Certainly
Oscar Rocchi was one of the most brilliant unrecognized composers of this library era that strikes us today as full of formidable riches. And that's especially obvious when you listen to this record for which I profusely must thank my library collector friend for locating and allowing me to overhear. It's just a little incomprehensible that this music was thrown into an odd kind of remainder bin junkyard without any further attention paid to it. Where were the listening human beings who first or thereafter played this and considered that maybe the music here was worth preserving and disseminating, given that it stands comparison to some of the best fusion of this admittedly already over-rich time? It's an utter mystery to me...
Each track obviously is a musical image of some alcoholic libation, some successful evocations, some leave me a little puzzled in terms of how styles relate, but the music is always strong and impressive. Consider the vodka entry, which makes one think of impoverished and depressed Russians in Red Square, where the life expectancy of the average male is now down to less than 60:
Probably the most successful mixology between music and cocktail is Kirsch, wherein the German or Swiss cherry-based liqueur achieves a wonderful pick-me-up quality from the guitar figures. And notice how in the background the odd tempo of the rhythm section compliments those same phrases of the much slower melody.
The track called Kummel (a
dutch liqueur that shockingly, I had never heard of), on the other hand will surely make all the fusioneers out there jump back into their spaceships for a light-speed interstellar drive to Andromeda (please include me in, with a window seat):
Killer stuff. And I know-- I just
know, that many of you out there will literally fall out of your chairs as I did when you listen through from beginning to end to this astonishingly well-composed and played album... It goes without saying we will be trying to seek out more hidden treasures that fell from the mind of Oscar Rocchi...
I mean,
wow...
