CANTERBURY SCENE

So, coordinating those sessions meant long nights, excellent brew, and cross-collaboration with both Roxy Music's alumni as well as reconvening the old band to reinvent song arrangements and create something fresh. "Mainstream" shows the quartet as anything but a conventional rock act, struggling to establish a unique identity but in the best possible fashion. This album is clearly the other side of the musical coin with distinct variations on "Diamond Head".

Bearing sonic similarities with "Diamond Head", how could it not if using many of the same musicians, engineers and studio, "Mainstream" is a far more unusual affair. Informed by the progressive jazz predilections of its band's members, yet rooted in the distinctive textural playing of Manzanera, the album sounds like little else of its era. The songs and understated nature of the project made the recording almost a tribute to the previous incarnation of the band with hints of the "801 Live" to be. Largely dispensing both with vocals and prog song convention, the songs on "Mainstream" aim for the challenging end of the pool, and nearly always hit their mark. At times the songs feel improvised and in others move in multiple directions at once. They're carefully thought out pieces. Manzanera's guitar shrieks and screams while the band engages in some tricky, jazzy playing underneath. Like modern jazz, each player's part is inventive and worth individual attention. Like prog, there's power and fury in much of the playing. Yet, like rock, it well rocks, undoubtedly.

About the tracks, probably the best piece on the album is still "Mummy Was An Asteroid, Daddy Was A Small Non- Stick Kitchen Utensil" due to the work of both, keyboardist Dave Jarrett and Manzanera's playing. It's nowhere near as wacky as its title might suggest. Instead it's a guitar shrunk feast with glittering Caravan's styled keyboard runs. All delivered in an aggressive "Starless And Bible Black" era King Crimson's style. Demos of the band's early works which were sent to various record labels of the day are included, as well as the rejection slips, which further reveal Jarrett as the Mike Ratledge acolyte he truly was. Pieces such as "Years Of The Quiet Sun", an original demo, and "R.F.D." show the organist and the entire band in fact playing in the wonderfully twisted Soft Machine improve style as signposts for them to finding their feet. Also it's especially quite cool to hear Manzanera's soaring leads on those tracks. The highlight of "Trot" is a lovely piano solo from Jarrett. "RongWrong" has always been an oddity among oddities. It bears almost no similarity to a same named track from "801 Live" album. That latter version has straightforward vocals, courtesy of Brian Eno, but the one on "Mainstream" is, like everything else on this difficult but yet wonderful prog rock album, primarily instrumental. Here, when the vocals do appear, they're quite different, both in content and delivery. They're every bit as off-kilter as the rest of the sounds that coming out of "Mainstream". Anyway, all tracks sound nice to me.

Albums like "Mainstream" and many other British jazz-rock groups provided a stepping stone into jazz proper. They also got me listening to many American prog jazz/rock artists like Return to Forever, Weather Report, Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock and Pat Metheny. "Mainstream" is thankfully no longer "a lost gem", as many others, as many still refer to it, and Quiet Sun was a missed opportunity for the music industry at the time, and by 1972 they were no more. Thanks to Phil Manzanera's fame with Roxy Music, we have this fitting tribute to a highly talented bunch of musicians, and I for one will keep on going back to play it many times as I want. "Mainstream" is more than 40 years old, but "Mainstream" is still an enjoyable album to listen to. So, I recommend this album at all prog rock fans. "Mainstream" is a great album.

2. Fish with the aqueous intro, obvious; flute and rock-jazzy approach with the sax of KING CRIMSON expressive, shrill, avant-garde, used today for the cinematic interlude before its time 3. Meditation of the Snake starts with the reverberant side, psychedelic much more than Canterburyen; the guitar talks and will get lost on a cozy shore.

4. The Salmon Song in 4 parts too, a tenacious rock atmosphere from the start; it calms down quite quickly by starting on a rock drift to LOU REED, stamped with the guitars that talk to each other; Pierre's drums become frenetic, GONG, Mike OLDFIELD will be his future groups. Miquette comes to give voice to the finale which gets carried away, going into possession mode.

5. Aftaglid and the last piece with a soaring atmosphere that goes to HAWKWIND for the air, the rest is done with Steve who bellows, shears, slices with his guitar; the soaring psyche is doubled by a trans air before its time; the drawers do not see themselves passed, except for the one with the acoustic arpeggio hitting our ears for the softness suffered; a psyche-oriental break for the smoking guitar in the distance which like the Pytie comes to preach to the depths of the Heavens. Halfway through and the tone becomes solemn, flirting precisely with the atmospheres of the great PINK FLOYD in their psychedelic period; this is too much for Steve who takes the course again by letting his notes decline along the bass held by Mike while Didier switches to the sax rather than the oriental flute on this mantranic passage. The guitar spurts, a stronger rhythm and we would move on to hard, like what everything is a question of vibration, creation and listening. The finale with the repetitive chorus to continue to dance blissfully on this languorous air; a small finale that amplifies, Steve adds a small solo, one more to bewitch. Minimalist outro reverberating once again, piece that moves away radically from Canterbury to approach space rock.

The ace up the band's sleeve was, of course, Allan Holdsworth who would become one of Frank Zappa's biggest inspirations . The band had never featured a guitarist before, but who would they have been to turn down an opportunity to play with one of the greatest jazz fusion guitarists to have ever lived? As transient here as he was with U.K. and Bruford, he only stuck around for this one album; you can't tie a musician like that down, and his presence on Bundles is what makes it such a special album indeed.

Holdsworth's solos dominate on the first part of the epic opening track Hazard Profile, an incredible reworking of Jenkins's Song for the Bearded Lady from his Nucleus days. Even in a nine-minute song, one never gets tired of hearing his blistering fingerwork, transcendental as it is. The band take a breather with the quiet Toccatina before returning in full force for Parts Three through Five, delivering a lengthy jam in ⅞ before finishing with four repetitions of the kind of obnoxiously complicated phrase that prog fans seem to love. While Hazard Profile isn't the most cohesive of suites, it still makes for an utterly exhilarating nineteen minutes that always seems to fly by.

Over on Side Two, we get another suite of continuous music, though this time the names are kept separate. The title track is another time signature work out, segueing into Land of the Bag Snake, heavily punctuated by John Marshall's china cymbal. Next are two compositions by the only remaining founding member Mike Ratledge, the serene The Man Who Waved at Trains and the more pyrotechnic Peff. Four Gongs Two Drums might be the low point of the album, a mercifully brief assortment of randomly banged percussion. The proceedings are topped off with an oddity; The Floating World is a soothing, minimalistic track that suggests The Soft Weed Factor from Six. While pleasant, it feels more like a relic from the past that has mistakenly found its way onto a jazz-rock album.

Esoteric's reissue includes an unearthed recording from the band's subsequent tour that was made for broadcast. Curiously enough, the recording was made at Nottingham University, where Renaissance also did a set a few months later, included on Esoteric's expanded edition of Scheherazade and Other Stories; was Nottingham University the place to go to make these sorts of recordings, or is this just a pure coincidence? At 79-minutes, the length of this recording is about as much as you can fit on a single CD, and features a brilliant set that includes all the highlights from Bundles as well as a couple of numbers from the band's subsequent album, Softs. This recording features John Etheridge on guitar as Holdsworth had already left the group by that time, breaking the commitment he had made to join them for one tour. His style is certainly nowhere near as distinct and Hazard Profile in particular suffers for this, but the band still give a rousing performance, nonetheless. For my money, they do seem to rush through Hazard Profile a bit quickly though, managing it a full four minutes faster than on the album. These live documents are a fascinating insight into the band's onstage energy back in the day, and the audio quality is extremely good considering its age. 5 stars very great guitar performance by Alan Holdsworth.

But after Mariano left, the band enlisted the help of Elton Dean, who obliged and joined their ranks. More than a dozen years ago I mentioned when reviewing "Spiral Staircase" that I would have loved to have heard music from Elton Dean's stint with the band. So you can imagine when I saw this cd pop up on the Wayside music site, I just about fell over myself to order it. And that cover! My favourite of 2024. And taken by a young Anton Corbijn. And if you don't know who he is, google his name you will be surprised. He also took the band photos which are all in black and white. Just a great package overall. Again, with Anton here, this is SUPERSISTER drawing some very talented people into their circle.

What I didn't know was that Elton Dean played a lot of concerts with this band, and they found one of these rare recordings. The sound quality is very, very good by the way. We have original members Robert Jan Stips on keyboards, Ron Van Eck on bass, along with Herman Van Boeyen on drums. Herman was also on that Iskander" album. My biggest surprise was that the music is better than expected. It's not like their early stuff, in the sense that there is no humour here. And it's not as serious as "Iskander' in that jazz style. This is truly a SOFT MACHINE/ SUPERSISTER cross. It's just a little different, a different flavour if you will. So we get song titles like "Soft Sister" and "Super Machine" playing on this fact.

The distorted organ and keys at times are so good. A lot of organ and electric piano. Elton is almost perfect here. He's not dominating all of the time, like some of his free jazz stuff, in fact often when he solos, so does the keyboardist. The other cool thing with this live release is that like SOFT MACHINE this band put their heads down and played from start to finish with the tracks all blending into one another, although there is that second half of "Judy Goes On Holiday" where there are the band member introductions. Of the eleven tracks, worth under 42 minutes by the way, six are improvs. The liner notes mention that the concerts that this lineup performed in consisted mainly of dazzling improvisations on themes derived from songs from their well-known albums.

I just love how this album sounds. Makes me wish they had done a studio album with Elton in this style. But I have this! Archival from 1974 by the way. And while I prefer the improvs on here overall, you have to hear the over 13 1/2 minute "Babylon", almost double it's length when compared to the studio version on "Iskander". And the opener titled "Fenderfarfissima" is just that, electric piano and organ.

I may bump this up to 5 stars down the road. And it certainly is joining my best of Canterbury list, joining "Presents From Nancy" and "To The Highest Bidder" in the process. My favourite purchase of 2024.

Corky guitar riffs, tasteful and angular guitar solos as well as heaps of vibrant sax and woodwinds, with the occasional "space whisper" interludes of Gilli Smyth, 'Angel's Egg' has a bit of everything in terms of musical diversity. If you subtract all the conceptual stuff, you get a Gong album full of thrilling, rich, and flamboyant psychedelic music with heavy influence from jazz rock and prog. Opener 'Other Side of the Sky' is an elaborate psych-prog avalanche of sounds and timbres, an almost structure-less piece with an otherworldly feel to it; 'Sold to the Highest Buddha' features some flashy guitar and sax parts that could have fit virtually any Soft Machine album perfectly, while the patchy second side delivers several more straightforward but no less surreal bits of Gong-y goodness - 'Oily Way', 'Inner' and 'Outer Temple', 'Love is How Y Make It' and the closing track are all gorgeous and represent some of the most exciting moments of the band's early works. This is an important album that marks the debut of Pierre Moerlen, too, and while 'Angel's Egg' might be an overall step up from 'Flying Teapot', it is only let down by 'Prostitute Poem' and 'Selene', which feel less diverse and a bit too overindulgent and trippy.

The silly short opener leads to the energetic and heavy track 'You Can't Kill Me', a playful piece that offers a very dynamic atmosphere contrasting with the mellower passages from the second side of 'Magick Brother'. Adopting more peculiar guitar techniques, a wider range of instruments and elevating the taste for the absurd even more, the album passes through the shapeless track 'I've Bin Stone Before' and the delirious 'Mister Long Shanks'. Another surreal entry follows in the face of 'Dynamite/I Am Your Animal' where the idea of creating noise and chaos prevails, allowing the listener to breathe in some of that psychedelic madness that surrounds Gong. The extended lengths of the songs is also noteworthy, with some of them reaching five or seven minutes, and while the winding fusion-y chops are not yet present, there is an idea of the experimental that is simply daring and unique. The tracks 'Fohat Digs Holes in Space' and 'Tropical Fish / Selene' exemplify exactly this, with the whole of 'Camembert' being a rather whimsical and fantastic introduction to the more serious musical side of Gong.

Now, this very first album from Allen, Smyth and Co. is a somewhat rough and ingenious creation, with quite a dilettante approach, yet there are some really good moments that indicate what future direction the band may take. Of course, there is a mesmerizing element to the spacey music as the album is divided into two thematic sides - "Early Morning" and "Late Night", indicating not only a recommendation on the listening hours and the textural differences of the two sides of the album, but also a conceptual side and a desire to present a piece of art that does not follow a standardized formula and dares to offer something with a twist. There are ostensible differences in the music on the two thematic sides but common to both of them are the hissing, jangling guitars through which Allen's old man voice makes his way, delivering some of the goofiest but most socially conscious lyrics. Didier Malherbe plays some flutes and sax as well, forming a nucleus of the band that would go on to break musical boundaries and experiment with genres and techniques. Some really fine, experimental entries on here include 'Glad to Say to Say', 'Chainstore Chant', 'Fable of a Fredfish' and 'Gong Song' as the prevailing element of absurdism captivates the listener.

Into the vaults it went, but thankfully not forgotten as I consider this essential for those who are into Canterbury. Two years prior to "Progress" being recorded Michael was the drummer for that John G. Perry album "Sunset Wading" and Geoff Richardson was a big part of that as well. I mention that because Richardson is like his left arm on this album, the most active musician on here besides Michael. John G. Perry also plays on this album adding bass to a couple of tracks. Geoff Richardson plays guitar for the most part, but he also adds viola, flute, and bass on one track.

Peter Giles is the main bass player, and besides his incredible performance, I have to add Michael's punchy drum work, and also the electric piano, which is on half the tracks as being the big draw for me here. I love upfront bass, electric piano and drumming like this. These three things push this album up to that five star rating. This is a recording I can't wait to put on. And very consistent. And speaking of electric piano, Dave McRae is on here adding some class. The man was with both MATCHING MOLE and NUCLEUS. John Mealing plays most of the piano on here though. But yeah, Jimmy Hastings is here and some other horn players. Michael takes care of the vocals and I like his voice. He also has Catherine Howe singing on a couple of songs. And she's great.

I spent time with this record over 5 years ago and I have to admit this just keeps getting better. No weak links, which is huge for me being an album guy. This seems like a concept album, in the sense if you read the song titles it's like a day in the life. Ten tracks and over 42 minutes. There's a couple of one minute pieces including the opener "Sunrise" a mysterious and subtle soundscape. The other is "Daydream" which I like better. It's hard for me to even keep it to a top five with the eight remaining songs, that's how much I'm into this album.

It's interesting that my top three are the three longest ones, all around 6 minutes in length. So lets start with those. First is "Midsummer Day" which has a unique sound to it with Michael playing a naive guitar it's called. It's played throughout and is the main sound. Michael sings and only gets help from Richardson here as he adds flute, guitar and bass. My third favourite tune on here. Just original sounding.

The title track is incredible. Three horn players plus guitar, bass, drums and vocals. Peter's bass sound is off the charts good but there's so much going on with this tune. It's pretty intense after 2 minutes with the horns and bass leading. And the drumming? Don't ask! Final top three is the closer "Arrival" with again three horn players but with a female singing during the second half, but it's the drums, bass and electric piano that kill. How about "Rocking"? The one track with Hastings on it, but also two more horn players. A theme here. And it's the one track where Michael adds clavinet. Thankyou! A punchy drum led tune.

Funny but "Moving" reminds me of KING CRIMSON from the early eighties. Even though this is the late seventies. The vocal style reminds me of Belew. Such a catchy tune. "Rolling" is another one that stands out. Punchy and funky with Michael singing. The bass is again so good, and it's John G. Perry this time. "Departure" the second song, but really it's the opener after that one minute intro piece. And it's worthy of being the opening track with that electric piano from Giles especially standing out, yes Michael Giles. McRae adds a piano solo here as well.

Lastly I'll mention "Shunter" because it's all Giles, but unlike the other "all Giles" tune "Nightdream", this isn't all drums and percussion or just one minute long. He adds keyboards to great affect along with his drum and percussion work. It's really good. Yes I'm bumping this one up!