Label:
ESP Disk – ESP-1009, ESP Disk – ESP-1009
Format:
Vinyl, LP, Album, Stereo / Country: US / Released: 1965/66 ?
Style:
Free Jazz, Free Improvisation
Recorded
At Bell Sound Studios, New York City, May, 1965.
Art
Direction – Paul Frick
Cover
– Bob James
Engineer
– Art Crist
Matrix
/ Runout (Runout stamp side A): ESPS 1009A
Matrix
/ Runout (Runout stamp side B): ESPS 1009B
This
version has BOB JAMES as artist on cover, and BOB JAMES TRIO as artist on
labels. Black & white print cover, and orange labels with black print.
A1
- Explosions
.........................................................................................
5:42
Written-By – Bob James
A2
- Untitled Mixes
....................................................................................
5:17
Written-By – Bob James, Bob Ashley
A3
- Peasant Boy
........................................................................................
8:30
Written-By – Bob James, Gordon Mumma
B1
- An On
................................................................................................
8:54
Written-By – Barre Phillips
B2
- Wolfman .............................................................................................
6:07
Written-By
– Bob James, Bob Ashley
Bob
James – piano
Barre
Phillips – bass
Robert
Pozar – drums, percussion
+
Robert
Ashley / Gordon Mumma – electronics [electronic tape collage]
Bob
James is more known for his break-filled fusion sides for Tappan Zee and
Columbia and his production for CTI than as a curious figure in the avant-garde
jazz milieu of the 1960s. In fact, his two dates as a leader from this period
have pretty much slipped under the radar. His first, Bold Conceptions (Mercury,
1962) was produced under the aegis of Quincy Jones upon the trio's winning of
the Collegiate Jazz Festival. Featuring drummer Bob Pozar and bassist Ron
Brooks, it combined post-Bill Evans textures with a hefty dose of shifting
meters, plucked and prepared piano strings, magnetic tape, chance operations
and unconventional sounds.
Explosions,
recorded in 1965 in New York with Barre Phillips replacing Brooks on bass,
jumps with both feet into the electro-acoustic improvisation field, with
significant assistance from Robert Ashley and Gordon Mumma of Sonic Arts Union.
Their contributions are especially notable in a version of Ashley's
multi-channel tape composition "Wolfman" and Mumma's assault on Barre
Phillips' "Anon" (here titled "An On").
James
more than acquits himself as a free player, coaxing dense clusters at both the
high and low end, beginning "Peasant Boy" in glassy arpeggios that
mate with the fluid, all-over lines of Phillips and Pozar. Affinity for Ran
Blake and Don Friedman enter into James' approach to a sparse canvas, at once
plaintive and rustling both at the keyboard and in the "guts," in
conversation with knitting needles and high bass harmonics. It's not clear
whether the tape manipulations were added to the first track in real time, but
they flesh out the shadowy, lower-register group improvisation as it reaches a
brief crescendo.
A
comparison might be made to Burton Greene (a Moog and piano-string jazz
pioneer), but unlike his emotionalism and folksy melodies, the Bob James Trio
seems more academic in its investigations, with deliberateness in the
combinations of sounds. That's not a slight—rare indeed is a successful pairing
of electronic and acoustic audio collage, much less in a mid-1960s jazz
setting. Whirring feedback and tape manipulation are part of the instrumental
palette, alongside temple blocks, bells and chimes, ping-pong balls on piano
strings, and a florid approach to "conventional" free playing.
Couple
this with the fact that this is one of the most cleanly recorded items in ESP's
catalog, and Explosions is a weighty historical artifact not to be missed.
(by
Clifford Allen / AAJ)
If
you find it, buy this album!
