Some Requests: Eddy Palermo's 1985 Jazz Fusion Mood and Gerard Marais's 1986 BBG (Big Band de Guitares) [FLAC limited time only]

 

Eddy Palermo is an Italian guitarist. This album appears with his ensemble discogged here.  It's quite light fusion with pleasant sounds, typical of the era, all instrumental. 

A Song for You:

I threw in the album called Eddy Loves Frank, made up of big band versions of Frank Zappa. It's a little bit interesting, note the Regyptian Strut cover:

Unfortunately I was not too pleased with some of the other versions, such as the immortal Echidna's Arf.  And it oddly enough ends with a rendition of America the Beautiful, rather than 'America the empire wannabe'.  I guess it kinda makes sense considering it came out in 2009.

Gerard Marais, who was in my Instants Chavires with Pifarely posted so long ago, is typical French progressive jazz, as you can easily discern and detect form my sample called Sagittaire:

Levallet Marais Pifarely return with Eowyn, from 1986

So later in the eighties they made a more commercially oriented album, if you can call complex chord changes, intricate violin patterns and quasi-atonal melodies played by a highly musically educated trio, commercial.

At any rate it's more accessible than the previous outing-- a welcome relief I would say.
It definitely recalls Confluence and the series of albums I posted related to their artists such as The Great Gousti.

A stunning track that recalls the great French violinists, like David Rose soloing in his best moments, A3's Siegfried, composed by Didier Levallet (bassist and 3/8th composer on this LP):





Pifarely contributed 1/8th and thus Marais is responsible for fully half.

Throughout this record I try to follow their minds as they play and I find it both exhilarating and exasperating trying to follow their complex calculus of sound-- like when I first learned about tensors (the higher order vectors), and their transformations...

Levallet, Marais, Pifarely - Instants Chavirés from 1981-- by request

Gerard Marais was the guitarist (and a composer) in Dharma Quintet, whose Mr. Robinson I featured in this space before (recently I reuploaded it too, which see).  The two others are Dominique Pifarely on violin and Didier Levallet on bass.  This trio made two records, the first being herein.

It turns out these guys are very similar to other cerebral French jazz I posted before involving violinists, such as LBC Trio, the Prao album, and Confluence, or their separated musicians such as the wonderful Capon/Escoude work Gousti, although I could not declare with a straight face that it is quite as good to my ears.

Consider the opening track:





Note that some were recorded live.