By request, the missing Christian Escoude Quintet's Reunion (1976)

We have covered this French jazz/fusion/prog guitarist extensively in the past on this blog (most recently here, which also turned out to be the most popular of the albums I posted!).  I actually really love some of his work which combines the French tendency for delicatesse with inventive and well-thought-out compositions that are far from hackneyed (like the US jazz I grew up on, add wink emoticon).  Someone gave a brief review on the discogs entry for this LP:

Fantastic Guitar Jazz record with many influences. Huge line up with Franck Able (Cane and Able, Afro Lafayette Rock Band and Bobby Boyd Congress) and Jean Querlier (Confluence & Dharma). Recommended!

For those familiar with those stalwarts of the seventies scene like Dharma Quintet, Confluence, etc., this is very similar and applicable.

Note all the nonsense titles, except for the first one.  The last track, called Eric et Raph, is the most similar to the old Confluence stuff although the central section becomes a little bit too generically jazzy:





Don't worry, there are more great tracks in there...

Christian Escoudé Group Feat. Toots Thielemans (1983)

Quite happy this one was pointed out to me as missing from his discography.  It's always worth listening to what guitarist Escoude has to say.  Interestingly Kadjan is producer of this record, note full information here.

A track called Faces is unique in how progressive it is with the featured star on harmonica:





Just listen to the delicacy of the ascending guitar chords in that very light and so French opening sequence.  This one by keyboardist Olivier Hutman.  Toots himself appears quite sporadically, popping up here and there in some tracks alongside the other soloists as an equal, and is certainly not front and centre, which is a harmonically good thing.

Love the fact the album is on the lengthier side.  Not a minute of boredom, except possibly the drum solo in the long track on the second side, and some of the gypsy material that, as is customary with this artist, Christian can never quite bring himself to eschew.

Back to the great guitarist Christian Escoudé with Gipsys' [sic] Morning from 1981

Just to quickly review, Escoude played with the cellist Capon (4 Elements, Gousti) who I covered extensively in the past.  Originally I got into him due to his involvement in the highly intellectual French chamber prog band Confluence, still one of my favourites.  In addition, Escoude made other records with other artists, obviously, as can be seen in the database.  Again mention should be made of the 1983 trio combo with Lockwood and Catherine, which I recently posted.  This record came just before, and features a lot of Philippe Catherine-like invention on that gypsyish basis advertised in the title.  He's playing with Olivier Hutman, Nicolas Fiszman, and famed drummer Jean-My Truong (Ergo Sum, Perception, Tangerine, Yochk'o Seffer, etc., did they have a shortage of percussionists back then in France?).

So this one is not quite as good in my opinion as the 1983 work but it's still at a very high level of musical quality, thankfully.  Needless to say it's all instrumental.  What I enjoy most about Christian is when he gets into his very introspective phases, thinking deeply about a particular jazz phrase or unusual chord and expanding it into its possibilities, meditating almost, mulling over this or that pretty turn, I guess similar to Catherine but unlike the latter's exploding amp, more inward-looking.

For example in his witness to Place Victor Hugo (16e arrondissement in Paris, look out for the dog poop as you circle the Egyptian obelisk carefully, and don't do it for too long, or some crabby old lady carrying a baguette invariably will yell at you for spending too much time staring at their stolen monuments, usually from Napoleon, as if Paris isn't 100% economically propped up by money coming in from incessant tourists and other naive visitors, believe me, I promised my wife I would never go back there, how romantic that experience was almost getting run over by zooming cars spewing out diesel exhaust in our faces as we step on their precious pavement, but how romantic can you be in a city in which restaurants treat like you a family of rabid hyena made of rotting meat:

Ah oui, la France: it's a love-hate relationship, just like Italy, isn't it?  There is one thing I will say with no guilt or compunction whatsoever though, I've tried wines from all over the world, some of the best ever in days past, and I can honestly say French wine is crap for the price you have to pay.  And the vintage system!  I am not going to try to nail down in which year you have to buy a certain wine, it's too much work, too unreliable, too randomly arbitrary, and give the French way too much allowance for being hard to please.  Oui, bring me to the guillotine, guys!  And drop it as I smash a bottle of your Bordeaux on my chopped off head!  I understand those blind taste tests in which oenophiles pick Chilean, Aussie, or US wines over the 'famous' French Chateaux...  I totally understand.  You can't argue with that kind of scientific objectivity.   Et s'il vous plait n'ejacule pas dans mon vin, garcon!  Ou pas de pourboire pour toi!!! Merci!  What? Tip is already included here?  Yeah no wonder, with service like this!! You know what, we'd never put up with this back home!  Vous etes un fromage, vous-meme!

Sorry if I offended anyone.  Returning to the record, I'll show you another fromage oops I mean track called Bibillou--

I like this of course because it reminds me of those 1976 glory days: Elements, with the great Capon...  A little bit of that 70s magic beauty.

Both samples by Christian incidentally though not all the music is.  Lucky for us French music is far superior to the wines.

Review of another violinist: the great Didier Lockwood, with his relatively unknown album from 1978: Thank You Friends

We covered David Rose long ago, Zbiggy Seifert more recently, Zippy Reinhardt less recently, and here we are now with Lockwood.  There is also the slightly  lesser known French violinist Michel Ripoche who was covered extensively in the prognotfrog days of the paleozoic.

When I was desperate to hear Lockwood's New World again recently (to restore the masterpieces to my fixed ipod) I saw to my dismay there was an item in his oeuvre outstanding from 1978, namely this one he made in collaboration with the great Francois Cahen (who I just read passed away in 2011).  Everyone knows with whom he played, right?

Consider the dreamy atmospherics of Reves de Musique:





And then consider the fact that it's representative of the entirety of this wonderful LP filled with long and well-thought-out tracks and advanced composition.

For ages my favourite piece from Lockwood has been La manufacture du sucre englouti:





It's so beautiful it's like magic.  With (co-composer) Gordon Beck on piano, starting off by channeling Bill Evans obviously but moving on to create an amazing amalgam of classical Ravel and the tenderest jazz piano.  Those were the days, right?  (I'm not sure wherefrom the curious title derives, it means The manufacture of submerged sugar).

I didn't include the 1981 Fusion which is good but well-distributed online, but I did the next year's Fasten Seatbelts, which despite a couple of tracks is mostly disappointing.  Having said that, listen to his ingenious musical exploration of the largest blood vessel, the Aorta:





Btw reviewing Lockwood reminded me of the Catherine - Escoude - Lockwood trio album from here.  For those with better memories than myself, Didier also appeared (with Escoude) on the amazing String Summit record that featured Wolfgang Dauner.  And I should mention his brother the keyboardist Francis who also made some great fusion records back in the day, including Debbi.


So who's the best of the fusion violinists?  The overpopular Jean-Luc Ponty, David Rose, Reinhardt, Zbiggy Seifert, Michel Ripoche, or our current feature?  In all honesty the best single album is Seifert's Passion, but as a whole, Lockwood had the most amazing work, especially when you listen to Surya and the way it flows together so beautifully from start to finish.

String Summit's One World in Eight, 1981

When you look at the involvement here of famous jazz or fusion musicians you get the feeling it's like a high school reunion.  From discogs:

Bass – Barre Phillips, Bo Stief
Cello – Abdul Wadud
Drums, Percussion – Fredy Studer, Pierre Favre
Engineer – Franz Wagner, Norbert Kloevekorn*
Flugelhorn – Ack van Rooyen
Guitar – Christian Escoudé, Harry Pepl [note that these two have appeared here before, separately, both more than once]
Piano, Synthesizer – Wolfgang Dauner
Trumpet – Ack van Rooyen
Violin – Didier Lockwood, John Blake, Krzesimir Debski

Bringing in so many luminaries does not though lead to a nonlinear multiplication in quality, as is so often the case, with the opposite effect perhaps in evidence.  Dauner once again as he did with the Family of Percussion pulls out his old Trans Tanz composition.


First crazy track called One World in Three (written by the violinists D. Lockwood, Blake and Debski):

More Capon / Escoude [Confluence] with their Gousti from 1980, by request

This album features more of the gypsy guitarwork of Escoude and less of the avant-garde / free jazz that Capon (and his bandmates in Confluence) seemed so enamoured of.  Yet, straddling that humongous, almost Bering-straits-like 1980 divide between good music and garbage, it is so interesting to hear the changes between the two continents, never the twain shall meet.   Having said that, the Capon track "Astarte" is a dead ringer for a Confluence track, listen and see what I mean:






There are quite a few others that will make you, if they did me, quite nostalgic for the seventies obsession with utter artistic beauty...


With regards to the last track, called Gondwana (really it should be Gondwanaland), I was quite amused on reading recent geology tomes that the supercontinent Pangaea (which united all continents some 250 million years ago, just before the age of the dinosaurs) will be reunited again, some 200 million years from now, when the continents now so clearly widespread on the globe return together again, and that this is a long-scale cycling activity, with a period of about half a billion years-- yet when that occurs no human being will be alive to see it... what will be the dominant lifeform then? insects? birds? some variety of rats' and pigeons' descendants, or the children of cockroaches, possibly become intelligent again?  Unfortunately they will not be able to avail themselves of precious metals, rare earths, iron, or fossil fuels, since humanity will have used those up in the process of its inevitable extinction...
It's so fun to imagine what the earth will see, so many millions of years from now...  One thing I do know: it will no longer bear witness to this music, since even today there are so few who do.

Confluence, from beginning to end, 1976 to 1978

Confluence made three albums in the great French tradition of avant-garde jazz, that is, progressive jazz linked with modern music a la Stravinsky or Schoenberg.  So it's a style I love very deeply, personally.

Capon and Escoude were in the first two, I posted their album Quatre Elements here, the link is new for those who need it.  I also have the 1980 Escoude album, Gousti, which has some gypsy elements (for which he had a predilection) but is still quite enjoyable and progressive.  My personal favourite album is the middle one, with the outrageously beautiful and oh-so-french-sounding Les Quais En Automne (a reference to the quais on the river Seine in Paris?) which was written by none other than Capon, and note the melancholy of the oboe:





Here are some earlier remarks about them from pnf (four years ago!) by permission:

"Here we have the final unavailable French Confluence album (chronologically the first). The second and third albums, Arkham and Chroniques Terrestres, were made available at mutant sounds some time ago. As far as I know this one was not before online, but it's nice to complete the work of this undeservedly unknown band.  "Quietly gorgeous French jazzy prog of a very airy, languid and spacious sort, often focused around the wistful cello work of Jean-Francois Capon, whose devastating outfit Baroque Jazz Trio recently had their one eponymous album reissued. One of France's great undiscovered treasures" is the surprisingly subdued description from mutant sounds of Arkham. I would say that it is actually chamber jazz, with a very well-worked melding of chamber orchestra (a lot of violin, flute, cello, double bass) and jazz. Less rock is in this recipe. Unfortunately one of the jazz elements employed is the long tedious and boring jazz solo. I defy anyone to listen thru the last track without fast-forward. This long "4 voyages" (through the sahara desert no doubt?) drags on quite too long before finishing in a gorgeous flute and violin passage using second notes on top of minor chords for that oh so plaintive effect. It is debatable whether the trip to that last 2 minutes was worth the wait...

These progressive musicians wrote a kind of music that has no rules, they use rock, jazz, and european classical in equal measure to create a whole that is perfectly harmonious and has no borders or styles. In my life I listened to modern classical, even Berg and Schoenberg, to jazz, to rock, and I feel like with this music I have come home, it has everything I have looked for in a lifetime of listening to music, all in one package. I hope you who enjoy this agree.    But when I come to work and on the radio I hear for the ten thousandth time "Signs signs everywhere there's signs" or even "Hotel California" playing it fills me with despair at the human condition.  

On a personal note, I wish I could post more albums but time constraints are again a problem with wife returning to work as a spaceperson (cosmonautova) and two small children which I have a lot of trouble to get rid of.  Surely when they finally go to school I will devote more time to this "weird, weird strange hobby" (my wife's words) of sharing progressive albums from the seventies ("Long before I was born???" as my receptionist always says).  A lot of people suggest to get a nanny but I wouldn't inflict these terrible, abnormal children, on any human being no matter how patient or expensively we pay them."

Well, since that was written, my wife is inside the Russian space station again conducting medical research on how to syringe out earwax blockages in zero gravity, my kids are in school currently driving their teachers crazy, and guess what?  I have all the time in the world to indulge in my "weird, weird hobby" as my wife put it of collecting old and forgotten music everyone finds quite off-putting and kind of useless from "long before I was born?" as the receptionists at work always love to tell me  in order to fill up the entire volume of my basement with vinyl records sure to get destroyed in the next crazy flood that hits our town...  hey, rock on, bros...

Jean-Charles Capon et Christian Escoudé de Confluence (Quatre Voyages, Arkham) présentent Les 4 Éléments en 1976

 

In the first two Confluence albums, Quatre Voyages (1976) and Arkham (1977) which should be well-known to the progressive fan, these two artists played cello and guitar, respectively.  They disappeared the next year by the time of the third album called Chroniques Terrestres.  So I was very excited when I saw this library-like album they made together outside of Confluence though contemporaneous.

Both men were relatively prolific:

http://www.discogs.com/artist/Jean-Charles+Capon

(Notice that Capon was in the Baroque Jazz trio with George Rabol, who in 1970 made a wonderful French fusion album that is strongly recommended.)

The guitarist Christian Escoude has a kind of gypsy style which is not really in evidence on this particular record on the subject of the four elements.

The track I will sample is the most beautiful and most similar to Confluence circa Arkham, L'Air: