THE END OF AN EAR

ROBERT WYATT was of course one of the founding fathers of progressive rock's Canterbury Scene given his membership of the archetypal Canterbury group The Wilde Flowers which quickly disintegrated into Soft Machine and Caravan. It's no secret that ROBERT WYATT's stint with early Soft Machine was a tumultuous one but they managed to crank out a couple unique albums before totally shifting gears on the band's lauded masterpiece 'Third' which forewent the psychedelic pop tendencies of the first two albums and took the leap of faith into the world of avant-garde jazz-rock with instrumental sprawlers that led to a double album.

By this time WYATT's vocal oriented musical ideas were becoming increasing rejected as Mike Ratledge, Hugh Hopper and Elton Dean were making a beeline to the world of instrumental extremism with no time for the cute, cuddly melodies of the psychedelic pop past. This obviously caused great friction in the band and although WYATT's inevitable exit from the Softs would occur in only a year's time, in 1970 when 'Third' was released WYATT decided to use some of the rejected ideas and craft his own bizarre amalgamation of avant-garde jazz rock which surprisingly were unlike anything he would release in later years. The album made the perfect counterpart to what the Softs released the same. year.

THE END OF AN EAR is WYATT's debut as a solo artist and the only one in his canon before his horrible accident that ended his drumming career and left him a paraplegic. This album therefore is unlike anything that came after and in reality is the bridge between the avant-skronk proggy jazz-rock of 'Third' and WYATT's soon-to-be band Matching Mole which would find the lyric based vocal aspect in his writing again. Being somewhat of anomaly, THE END OF AN EAR is an exercise in free jazz mixed with heavy psychedelic organ sounds, hi-jazz piano techniques and progressive rock heft along with a wide variety of electronic accoutrements, sound techniques and freaked out esoterica. Vocals do occur but when they do they are wordless and provide bizarre rhythmic counterpoints to the incessant flow of avant-garde freakery.

While the music itself is calibrated to some weird parallel universe where customary conventions are far from the norm, the Canterbury whimsy shines through in the playful antics as well as the interesting track titles that refer to various Canterbury stalwarts such as Daevid Allen, Gilli Smyth, Nick Evans, Caravan, Jimmy Hastings, Kevin Ayers as well as others like Carla Bley, Marsha Hunt, Caroline Coon and WYATT's own half brother Mark Ellidge. Considered on his strangest solo offerings, THE END OF AN EAR takes on many familiar styles of music but finds them collaborating them in strange ways. Jazzy McCoy Tyner piano runs that spastically turn into demented Cecil Taylor bizarreness are accompanied by eerily hypnotic bass grooves, ethereal female vocals, atonal squawks from the cornet, saxophone and saxello along with various percussive noises dish up a strange interesting procession of sounds that take the most psychedelic features of the 60s and marry them with the demanding jazz techniques of the avant-garde free jazz crowd.

Despite the jazz and rock experiments, THE END OF AN EAR ultimately comes off a very transcendental hypnotic album takes all the rules of the prog and jazz playbooks and throw them out the window in lieu of a more uniform flow of sound that slowly unfolds with more sounds slowly accruing onto a glob of musical counterpoints. This one will come as a true surprise for anyone who has only experienced ROBERT WYATT's works from 'Rock Bottom' on but the unique delivery of different styles all mixed up in the most deliciously avant-garde methodologies is what makes this one so utterly addicting as it literally sounds like nothing else ever created.

While this one may come off as too weird for many, this is the kind of music avant-garde dreams are made of. The music is simultaneously mellow and soothing while offering some of the most unexpected hairpin turns of weirdness in all of Canterbury. This one may be the odd album out of the WYATT discography but is by no means one that should be missed. It really comes off as an early free form organic version of downtempo as the beats are steady and deliberate while the accompanying contrapuntal elements of piano, horns and percussion literally exist on separate plains of reality but somehow collude to craft a bizarre amalgamation that works quite well. Devoid of the emotional heart-wrenching subject matter of the future, THE END OF AN EAR is nevertheless a really brilliant album simply to get lost within its magnificent charm.