My review of Soft Machine's Switzwrland 1974, today at All About Jazz.
Thank goodness for Cuneiform Records. Beyond releasing cutting edge new music from now-longstanding groups like The Claudia Quintet and relative newcomers like Norway's Pixel, the intrepid American label continues to unearth, restore and release wonderful archival finds like S.O.S.' Looking for the Next One (2013), and the equally impressive Flashpoint: NDR Jazz Workshop-April '69 (2011), from one of the group's reed players, John Surman. Perhaps its most important work on the archival front has, however, been in sourcing live music from the various incarnations of Canterbury mainstay Soft Machine, from the early Dada-inflected days of Middle Earth Masters (2006) and its more freely improvised middle years heard on Grides (2006) through to transitional periods like NDR Jazz Workshop-Hamburg, Germany May 17, 1973 (2010).
One of the holiest of holy grails for Soft Machine fans has, however, been a recording made at the 1974 Montreux Jazz Festival, when a more fusion-oriented Soft Machine debuted with (for the first time since its early days) a guitarist in tow. Long available in low-fi form on YouTube and circulated as equally low quality bootlegs, Cuneiform has finally legitimately licensed the audio and video recording Soft Machine as it entered its final phase as pedal-to-the-metal fusioners, first with guitarist Allan Holdsworth and later, John Etheridge.
Holdsworth had, since his stunning appearance on Nucleus founder Ian Carr's Belladonna (Vortex, 1972) and subsequent work in the group Tempest, already begun making a name for himself as a guitarist with an utterly unique conception and facility that few others could match (then and now). The guitarist—with an inimitable rapid-fire legato style and unparalleled approach to building cascading lines of pyrotechnic prowess—would ultimately go on to work with many others, including American drummer Tony Williams' New Lifetime band on Believe It (Columbia, 1975), the group soon to be known as Pierre Moerlen's Gong on Gazeuse! (Virgin, 1976), French violinist Jean-Luc Ponty on Enigmatic Ocean (Atlantic, 1977), and with Bill Bruford, on the drummer's solo albums like Feels Good to Me (Winterfold, 1978), and also in the first incarnation of progressive rock supergroup U.K., with its eponymous 1978 E.G. Records debut, before launching a solo career that has since positioned him as one of the most influential jazz guitarists of the past four decades.
Continue reading here...
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by Steve F.
Bookmarks