More Tim Eyermann and East Coast Offering with 1978's Go-Rilla LP

This album features more of that fantastic fusion we love so much with its gorgeously progressive overtones.  Side one was entirely composed by Tim and side two by guitarist Phil McCusker, Jr.  I hate to say it but the second side is more interesting and inventive and listenable.

I was really pleased to hear the very chamber and composed Pastoral Piece in the middle of side 2, reminding me a bit of Coalition's wonderful "Mindsweepers" LP:





Only unfortunate is that as you can see it's only two and a half minutes long and there is nothing similar in the whole record.  Composition by McCusker.

And stay focused-- that last track by him ("The One that Got Away") is really great to follow, with its interesting changes in melodies and chords!

A 1980 Aloha from Tim Eyermann and the East Coast Offering!! [+ some requested reups]

As we all know, fusion went into a very light direction towards the end of the seventies-- I guess 'Bitches Brew' was by then a distant memory for the musicians who crafted some quasi-atonal sounds to spice up the jazz-rock sound.  And this is a perfect example of that sad tendency, or degeneration, alleviated slightly by some crafty songwriting from the team.  In terms of the compositional credits you can check on the back scan that Phil McCusker the guitarist, Wade Matthews the bassist, and Tim himself wrote most of the music with some help from keyboardists Bruce Harrison and Louis Scherr.

Surprisingly the track entitled 'Acapulco Harvest' (by Wade Matthews) isn't some silly mariachi-styled 1-4-5 guantanamara-like bitterly emetic syrup, but a soft and laid-back almost tender ballad with some interesting modulation and changes:





From the blissfully soft sounds I am surprised this was not given a Hawai'ian name in fact, to me it recalls the sunrise behind Diamond Head in Waikiki-- something I recommend everyone witness, much more beautiful than the acclaimed sunset over the waters...  Speaking of which, I was highly relieved to hear that 'Aloha' (by Phil McCusker and Bruce Harrison) wasn't commercialized and candied up with gratuitous silliness in the form of ukuleles, etc. So thankfully the musicians decided to at least maintain their respectability, although without the fusionastic crux of energy and insanity we are so addicted to, like my children are to nutella, or like the nutella co. is to destroying indonesian forests for palm oil for their product:





As for the subject of Hawai'i, I discussed it at length in an earlier post...  in a couple of months our family will be back for our yearly wintering there, and we all can't wait to smell that beautiful tropical air of orchids and feel the warm balmy dark breeze at HNL the Honolulu airport...  seeing the 'na pali' (high cliffs) diving into the ocean from a white sand beach...

We are now past Labour Day, another obscure and quite troubling holiday involving, as I understand it, gratitude to heaven or perhaps our positive spirit for being a proletariat worker dying to win the lottery and thus join the god-blessed 0.1%  rich billionaires who are able to jetset about their cities to order twenty dollar croissants shipped directly from the Champs-Elysees-- puzzling and in fact quite disconcerting as this day appears to be, it is not so much so maybe as Boxing Day, Hallowe'en, Easter, Mothers Day, and Fathers Day.  Yet we always get the faintest suggestion, as we humbly accept our day free of forced labour, that we are manufacturing consent (in Chomsky's words) in addition to manufacturing another order of burritos within 4 minutes, when we celebrate these, being told to accept our place as lowly hoi polloi suitable for employment in minimum wage jobs to ensure the continuing success of enormous abstract corporations that are free to plunder the earth like galactic sharks to make their bald, golfcart carried executives and stockholders fabulously wealthy, more wealthy than even Louis XIV could have even imagined, in order to provide us with more useless tools to waste away the interminable boredom of modern life... a very very puzzling state of affairs...

Tim Eyermann's Unity from 1977, USA, by request

This album strongly reminds me of the Listen with Mel Martin, or Natural Life LPs posted earlier on prognotfrog.  There is some latin tinge and chamber instruments to add a great deal of interest.  Compositions are by Tim.  From the blurb on the back:

"When Anthony Braxton, noted avant-garde reedsman, visited Washington D.C. in July 1976 he took some lessons on his flute and clarinet.  His teacher?  Tim Eyermann.  That Tim is so well respected among his professional peers gives some endorsement to his talents.  A better indicator however is the album in your hands..."   I encourage you to read the remainder when you get ahold of the package.

Tim plays oboe, clarinet, flutes (alto, regular, and bass!), all the saxes, and of course was the arranger and composer with the exception of the string arrangements which were by Mike Crotty.

The title track:





A lighter song featuring the flute, A Time Past: