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| Track list: 1. Birds Of Fire 2. Miles Beyond 3. Celestial Terrestrial Commuters 4. Sapphire Bullets Of Pure Love 5. Thousand Island Park 6. Hope 7. One Word 8. Sanctuary 9. Open Country Joy 10. Resolution Running time: 40 minutes Released: 1972 |
Random Jazz time. This came in the same big box of jazz classics that yielded albums by Weather Report and Clifford Brown that I have already listened to. I know sod all about it other than it falls into fusion. Could be good, could be terrible... only one way to find out.
This is a mixture of some very long and other very short tracks, some may drag whilst there is a blink and you miss it to others. An odd combination, but that pretty much sums fusion up, eh? The first track combines a gong or cymbal clashes with a prog-like guitar lead and loop, but quickly devolves down to a complete mess - none of the constituent parts being bad per se, but it is clear that they should not have been combined together. Just when I thought it could not add more elements, strings of some sort appear briefly, before vanishing. Too much is the simple summary, and I find myself distinctly not caring.
So, not the strongest start. It's Saturday, late afternoon. I should have dragged myself out gardening today but the energy and the will to tackle overgrown grass, unsupported rose stems and too many weeds to count is not there yet. Hopefully tomorrow - since it is supposed to stay dry. Miles Beyond takes a bit of time to come to life, but is immediately more promising than my first exposure (apparently I had never listened to any of these tracks before; per LastFM I had no scrobbles of Mahavishnu Orchestra prior to this post). This tune is more melodic, and the elements all seem to actually relate to each other this time, which is a plus point! There's a bit of a bum note with a drum solo, leading into guitar solos though, and what had been a nice build up culminates instead in a worthless hodge-podge of sound.
That seems to be this orchestra's (hah!) modus operandi. Too much sensory overload, not funky enough to be funk and not crafted well enough for me to appreciate it as jazz. It is all in stark contrast to The Cinematic Orchestra, whose contemporary jazz (well, I guess its mostly noughties jazz now, right?) is carefully considered. As I type that, two quick tunes have disappeared, and Thousand Island Park is playing; this is better - a Latin guitar inspired number it manages to stay well away from the OTT-ness of the material that preceded it. Not exactly a diamond in the rough, but a small value coin, at least.
Hope is fleeting, though. By that I mean the track is less than two minutes. At this point I don't really have any hope that the second half of the disc (in terms of tunes, not time - still most of that left) will be better. One Word is the true centrepiece of this album, comprising 25% of its length. It starts well enough and despite my scepticism I feel that if the excesses of earlier tracks are kept in check there could be a good tune here. However I really don't feel it is likely and we'll have to get well past the half way point before I begin to believe in any positive signs. That said, there's a really nice bass on this, a snappy rhythm. A solid platform to build from, and at 4 minutes in the track has matured alright. The weird modulated sounds that then pick up what passes as a tune are, alas, harbingers of less interesting bits and pieces from earlier, though in credit there is the fact that here there is generally only one in action at a time.
Drum solos. Have I said how much I dislike them? I can only think of one that I credit in any sense on record - in Limp, by Fiona Apple (which will appear here in, oh... 10 years or so at current pace!). I can see them being effective in a live performance, but for home listening they generally signify lifeless stretches of the recording. I suspect they only even exist as a thing because of the ridiculous "every sucker needs a solo" thing that jazz carried for so long. Again, in a live music environment, where individuals needed to show their skills to ensure work it made some sense, but it just doesn't by the time you are talking about established bands playing together regularly and selling records. Anyhow, the epic long piece has ended, and the feared over-stimulation never arrived, and despite the grumpy tone of this paragraph I think it is probably the best thing on the playlist so far. Better too than what follows immediately in its wake. There is more sense of time and space about Sanctuary - suitable for the title, but the track is lifeless along with it, sterile and boring, and seeming to last forever though what came before was twice its length.
The last couple of tracks then. Open Country Joy certainly conveys the open and joy parts of the title well enough, but I struggle to see the country, despite the employment of a fiddle. The first phase dies out and then we get a groovy guitar picking up proceedings. It falls very flat for me until that line dies, replaced by the fiddle and a high pitched tinkly keyboard picking up the joyful sense again. A real pity - take out the ham-fisted attempt at being something else in the centre of this tune and I would like it a lot more, but as it is... no thanks. The final number is also promising to start... a thrumming, dangerous feel to the tempo with the repeated bass and beats combining to set a nice stage. The track grows nicely too - they saved the best for last. Best by quite some margin - even though the pieces repeat they never grow old. The end of the track introduces a little light, which probably wasn't needed, but its a small slip up in what was otherwise a great and unexpected close. Overall, I found this poor, but a handful of enjoyable tracks rescue it from being a complete waste.
This is a mixture of some very long and other very short tracks, some may drag whilst there is a blink and you miss it to others. An odd combination, but that pretty much sums fusion up, eh? The first track combines a gong or cymbal clashes with a prog-like guitar lead and loop, but quickly devolves down to a complete mess - none of the constituent parts being bad per se, but it is clear that they should not have been combined together. Just when I thought it could not add more elements, strings of some sort appear briefly, before vanishing. Too much is the simple summary, and I find myself distinctly not caring.
So, not the strongest start. It's Saturday, late afternoon. I should have dragged myself out gardening today but the energy and the will to tackle overgrown grass, unsupported rose stems and too many weeds to count is not there yet. Hopefully tomorrow - since it is supposed to stay dry. Miles Beyond takes a bit of time to come to life, but is immediately more promising than my first exposure (apparently I had never listened to any of these tracks before; per LastFM I had no scrobbles of Mahavishnu Orchestra prior to this post). This tune is more melodic, and the elements all seem to actually relate to each other this time, which is a plus point! There's a bit of a bum note with a drum solo, leading into guitar solos though, and what had been a nice build up culminates instead in a worthless hodge-podge of sound.
That seems to be this orchestra's (hah!) modus operandi. Too much sensory overload, not funky enough to be funk and not crafted well enough for me to appreciate it as jazz. It is all in stark contrast to The Cinematic Orchestra, whose contemporary jazz (well, I guess its mostly noughties jazz now, right?) is carefully considered. As I type that, two quick tunes have disappeared, and Thousand Island Park is playing; this is better - a Latin guitar inspired number it manages to stay well away from the OTT-ness of the material that preceded it. Not exactly a diamond in the rough, but a small value coin, at least.
Hope is fleeting, though. By that I mean the track is less than two minutes. At this point I don't really have any hope that the second half of the disc (in terms of tunes, not time - still most of that left) will be better. One Word is the true centrepiece of this album, comprising 25% of its length. It starts well enough and despite my scepticism I feel that if the excesses of earlier tracks are kept in check there could be a good tune here. However I really don't feel it is likely and we'll have to get well past the half way point before I begin to believe in any positive signs. That said, there's a really nice bass on this, a snappy rhythm. A solid platform to build from, and at 4 minutes in the track has matured alright. The weird modulated sounds that then pick up what passes as a tune are, alas, harbingers of less interesting bits and pieces from earlier, though in credit there is the fact that here there is generally only one in action at a time.
Drum solos. Have I said how much I dislike them? I can only think of one that I credit in any sense on record - in Limp, by Fiona Apple (which will appear here in, oh... 10 years or so at current pace!). I can see them being effective in a live performance, but for home listening they generally signify lifeless stretches of the recording. I suspect they only even exist as a thing because of the ridiculous "every sucker needs a solo" thing that jazz carried for so long. Again, in a live music environment, where individuals needed to show their skills to ensure work it made some sense, but it just doesn't by the time you are talking about established bands playing together regularly and selling records. Anyhow, the epic long piece has ended, and the feared over-stimulation never arrived, and despite the grumpy tone of this paragraph I think it is probably the best thing on the playlist so far. Better too than what follows immediately in its wake. There is more sense of time and space about Sanctuary - suitable for the title, but the track is lifeless along with it, sterile and boring, and seeming to last forever though what came before was twice its length.
The last couple of tracks then. Open Country Joy certainly conveys the open and joy parts of the title well enough, but I struggle to see the country, despite the employment of a fiddle. The first phase dies out and then we get a groovy guitar picking up proceedings. It falls very flat for me until that line dies, replaced by the fiddle and a high pitched tinkly keyboard picking up the joyful sense again. A real pity - take out the ham-fisted attempt at being something else in the centre of this tune and I would like it a lot more, but as it is... no thanks. The final number is also promising to start... a thrumming, dangerous feel to the tempo with the repeated bass and beats combining to set a nice stage. The track grows nicely too - they saved the best for last. Best by quite some margin - even though the pieces repeat they never grow old. The end of the track introduces a little light, which probably wasn't needed, but its a small slip up in what was otherwise a great and unexpected close. Overall, I found this poor, but a handful of enjoyable tracks rescue it from being a complete waste.
