Daryl Runswick / Tony Hymas big bands 1974-1978

 

Tony Hymas for sure needs no intro on this blog, there's been a lot posted by him over the years.  I added the label so in theory you can search for all the times he's been mentioned.

Daryl Runswick:

Profile: English bass player, pianist, tenor singer, writer, arranger, producer, born 12 October 1946

With regards to this blog, he was in Atlantic Bridge, the Henry Lowther just posted, and notably in Harry Beckett's Joy Unlimited which was great, but not posted here, and then the long-running prog band called IF which all prog fans are familiar with, I'm sure.

These hail from two sessions, one in 1974 and the other called Senor Funk, from 1978:

1 to 4: Live recording, 22nd May 1974, at Golders Green Hippodrome, London

5 to 10: Studio recording 1978 at Lansdowne Studios, London

Track 1 is called When the Bough Breaks and is by Tony Hymas

The remainder is by Runswick.  Rather than big band, it's leaning more towards the usual funky fusion we love and expect here.  Enjoyable stuff, but definitely and not necessarily top of the line.

Back with more Tony Hymas in the remarkable Flying Fortress from 1988

Scanning his discography you can see we've posted his Insight, his Wessex Tales, and the remarkable and brilliant late 80s Aspects of Paragonne.  It was totally unexpected to think another late 80s album would be just as good, despite the quality of the last named, but I am always ready to be surprised.
It's like the case with Albert Allen Owen, where the 80s library albums were so weakly generic and as a commenter pointed out, perhaps the artist himself, "musicians have to pay the bills too" and it's for certain you're not going to get rich (or even stay away from starvation) with intellectual high-brow recondite brilliantly advanced composition, from which the average person recoils in disgust before turning on their youstupidtube for more Beyonce or whoever video to 'binge-watch' until their white matter turns into overcooked quinoa.  While I'm on the subject, it's always been a mystery to me why certain people, a small minority, love so deeply this style of advanced and unusual composition, many are probably musicians who find simple music irritating, but the others I wonder why.

Anyways, the album is called Flying Fortress, and here's a remarkable composition that will appeal to exactly that subset of quality music lovers, called The Great Wheel, I mean, it's tracks like this one that make me do all this endless searching that drives my wife so crazy (it's OK, it's a short drive):





If you look at the credits you'll see there are two parts to this oeuvre, and the second side, the spoken side, is markedly more disappointing.  Doesn't matter, even a few great tracks are enough to make me happy these days.  Even just one I should say.

As you can see I added a few more leftover albums from him, Age of Discovery (1979), the Piano album (1980), Face to Face (1984), and one of his collaborations with Jeff Beck from 1989.
On the piano album, note the stunningly inventive keyboard composition called Traffic:





Unfortunately, half the album is totally and completely generic.  So typical of these libraries.

Speaking of Jeff Beck, I was shocked some weeks back to discover the album called Blow by Blow from him (1975) which is as good a progressive guitar-based fusion masterpiece as any I've heard in my life.  Not sure if everyone out there is already familiar with that one, or like me, would never have expected something like that from the Beck-ola dude.

Have Sounds Will Travel, with Frank Ricotti, Tony Hymas, Sulzmann, and Les Hurdle

Just a wonderful library that I should have known of but didn't, with artists we have seen and reviewed here before including Ricotti, Hymas (Aspects of Paragonne), and Sulzmann.  Generic albeit sparse information is here on the database.

Under Pressure:





But the album ranges all over the map with the funk, fusion, wonderful beats, and inventive compositions we expect from the best library music, recalling almost the best of Hawkshaw.
Note however that the second side is markedly less impressive with far more generic compositions.

I threw in some more Tony Hymas (The Age of Discovery) and more Ricotti (Vibes, the album I loved so much, and No Title 1982) so four altogether.

Jacques Thollot 1971-1996 [limited time]

This was requested and because the artist is one of my all-time favourite composers in the progressive sphere I got onto it right away.

From discogs, briefly:

French jazz drummer born October 9, 1946 at Vaucresson, France. He died on October 2, 2014 at Mainneville, France.

Despite being a drummer, he composed most of his albums and played keyboards on Cinq Hops, clearly his masterpiece-- which was reissued to CD btw.  The early albums feature a great deal of the experimental noise and free improvisation that was so popular in those days, not too much drum solos or rather purely percussion tracks, but later when the music is more composed, it's absolutely sublime, well worthy of replacing the old tired works of Bartok, Stravinsky, and Schoenberg (which are so similar, minus the jazz/rock element) that are over-played in concert halls at the expense of brilliant new material from artists such as Thollot.  For those who follow the blog, the brilliant Jean-Luc Chevalier I featured numerous times before is very similar, but Thollot stays closer to his classical education roots.

This is my favourite song by him, which so perfectly mixes the classical chamber tradition with the aforementioned jazz/rock (magma style):

(On the Mountain, for Michele, from Cinq Hops.)  I'm always stunned at how these brilliant composers can take something as simple as the three first notes of the A major scale as in this song and transform them into something so brilliantly original by not just playing them, but playing with them.  Of course later in the song he shows his skills in adept chord changes.

And note that he played with Tony Hymas, whom we've seen before of course a few times here, in the 1990s.  From this period we have A Winter's Tale from his quartet, and Tenga Nina.

In the later albums the ambitious composition featuring mixed half-tones and whole tones or tritones is still present, but dare I say it, watered down a little by the generic jazz genre it's being promulgated with, and lacking that intense insanity that is typical of a young musician's creativity (like they say of mathematicians, whose best work is always before 30...)  Nonetheless, the old spark of crazy is still present in the closer of 1996's Tenga Nina, called L'au Dela (i.e. the afterlife):

I should also mention this stunning library album sure to make everyone salivate who haven't heard of it, and even those who have, called Hypnose, from 1974, featuring one track by Thollot (sheerly brilliant again), plus Jannick Top, Teddy Lasry, and others.  Obviously highly recommended to everyone.  

Aspects of Paragonne, from 1987 (Tony Hymas, Stan Sulzmann, John Taylor, Frank Ricotti, and Chris Lawrence...)

I featured some Tony Hymas - Stan Sulzmann material before, this album also has John Taylor on piano on some tracks and the legendary Frank Ricotti on percussion and vibes.  Despite the late date this is very much a part of the seventies spirit of fusion and progressive jazz.  It is without a doubt superior to the preceding "Insight" library album, although it appeared the next year, it might be that this combination of artists just felt like hitting gold again or were nostalgic for the classic sound of old, as indeed am I.

I wonder if "Monica and the Pirate" is a homage to Soft Machine's gorgeous "Chloe and the Pirates:"



And the "Aggression and Regression" track provides stunning chords (essentially, G sus, but with added G sharp, etc.) on top of a screwed-up scale of D - E - Fsharp - Gsharp - A - B - return to C.  Quite a shocking scale and chord to complement it.  Not in the Greek classification of scales, I believe.




The last track, "Before and After Zara" with the beautiful flute of Sulzmann really sounds like it came from a late seventies record, there's nothing to indicate the year of 1987 here, not at all:



There's the kind of nostalgia I like, the kind that delves 30-40 years into the past...

More library: Tony Hymas and Stan Sulzmann in KPM 1367: Insight, from 1986

Both Hymas and Sulzmann were luminaries in the Brit jazz scene.  If you look at their discographies you'll see they performed together in a few albums, I'll try to go through the ones that I know of.  First of all, Tony Hymas I've presented before in the Wessex Tales album as a composer and you'll notice similar material to that one on side one.  "Face to Face" I believe was presented by dusty shelf, the great library blog.  Their big collaborative masterpiece is the oddly-named record "Krark" from 1979-- just a gorgeous progressive-fusion album full of intense ideas and often featuring the odd pairing of saxophones and synthesizers which we heard before in the "SOS" album once posted on prognotfrog.

Stan Sulzmann was not quite as prolific as Tony Hymas as you can see from his discography.  The pair collaborated on two library albums (as far as I know, which is not much admittedly) of which this is the more disappointing, the first one, called Have Sounds will Travel, is a fantastic little funky library masterpiece, at least the first side is, because the second side doesn't involve these two musicians, instead feat. a very disappointing Les Hurdle and Frank Ricotti who almost is slumbering on this effort.  In regards to this album a lot depends on whether you have a taste for the eighties style, the drum machine, the reverbed chord, etc.

Here's a {slightly} well-written track that gives you a bit of an idea:

Now think back to that time in the mid eighties when CDs were about to blow away all this vinyl into the stratosphere... and fast forward to today, when we resuscitate this lost material for a tiny few people who appreciate this lost art form...

Tony Hymas' 1978 composition: Wessex Tales and Elements, KPM 1216

"Wessex Tales and Elements -- Two distinctive suites scored for 11 violins, 4 violas, 3 celli and 2 bassi and recorded in a natural acoustic."

Side A called "Wessex Tales" is "Rural life and scenes, past and present."

Side B called "Elements" is "A study of forces of nature."

I guess this is the kind of library record that will drive some to distraction, while others with a European classical predisposition or upbringing like myself will be entranced by the capabilities of the composer, the well-reputed Tony Hymas.  I am happy and not at all surprised he is still very much active in composition.  I love the way these guys were so well educated they were capable of composing music which equaled the great masters of European twentieth century music: Ravel, Bartok, Prokofiev, Stravinsky.

The title track "Wessex Tales" sounds like a string piece from a Mahler symphony but is far more intricately nondiatonic:


While on Side B, "Cloud Sculptures" and its polytonality remind me of some parts of "The Rite of Spring" (unfortunately not the good ones).  Between the two suites, the weaker is the second one, in opposition to the "Beethoven principle" that depression or tragedy are a source of creative stimulation, Tony instead seems to be an optimist since the happy side had more of a brilliantly creative spark.  It's also quite possible he got tired after writing the first 15 minutes or so of music.  This is what I believe happened with Puccini's La Boheme, which markedly deteriorates after the first act.


I know there are also a lot of library music fans out there, and I beg them to spread the word about our new blog.  I will be posting interesting library albums here and there (from my collection) which I hope are not already available online, though a mistake in that regard is eventually inevitable.