PHIL WOODS And HIS EUROPEAN RHYTHM MACHINE – Live At Montreux 72 (LP-1972 / Pierre Cardin – STEC 131)

Label: Les Disques Pierre Cardin – STEC 131

Format: Vinyl, LP, Album / Country: France / Released: 1972

Style: Free Jazz, Contemporary Jazz, Free Improvisation

Recorded June 19. 1972 at the Montreux Jazz Festival.

Design [Cover, both side] By – Pierre Cardin

Photography By [Front/Back Cover] – David Redfern

Engineer – Stephen Sulke

Graphics – Hartmut Pfeiffer

Mastered By – Christian Orsini

Producer, Mixed By – Emmanuel "Pinpin" Sciot

Original French pressing with round corners

Matrix / Runout (Side A runout, etched): STEC 131 A

Matrix / Runout (Side B runout, etched): STEC 131 B

It's not my rip (a gift from A. R.) so I apologize for the relatively poor sound. But the album is great.

A  -  The Executive Suite .................................................................... 26:00

B1 - Falling ........................................................................................... 9:00

B2 - It Does Not Really Matter Who You Are ..................................... 15:00

All compositions by Gordon Beck

Phil Woods and his European Rhythm Machine:

Phil Woods --- alto saxophone

Gordon Beck --- piano

Ron Mattewson --- bass

Daniel Humair --- drums, percussion

This LP is a real rarity how for the record company that produced it, so also for the jazz music and the huge number of admirers an early Phil Woods. The album has never re-issued on CD. 

In the early 70s, the Italian-French fashion designer Pierre Cardin, great lover of music, founded a record company in his name, which had very short life and that was distinguished by his covers particularly elegant artwork, designed by himself.

In the short period of activity he published several LP's, not only of jazz, among which also the French edition of the Concerto Grosso by New Trolls.

Of particular interest are the recordings made during the Montreux Jazz Festival 1972 concert by Jean-Luc Ponty, the Lubat, Louis and Engel Group, in addition to this the European Rhythm Machine Phil Woods, who at the time was hailed as a masterpiece.

Briton David Waddington critic of Jazz called this album "a fluid and breathtaking improvisation titanic wise." The A-side of the vinyl with engaging twenty-five minutes of 'Executive Suite was also described by critics Brian Case and Stan Britt, in their Illustrated Encyclopedia of Jazz, "a tour de force of the alto sax, with no accompanying sequences in which Woods gives vent his extraordinary instrumental mastery acute from screaming extreme to severe extreme moaning of the instrument. "

In England, the album was released by Verve, on granting the French publisher, with a different layout.

At a distance of forty four years the record is still valid and is an extraordinary testimony to the evolutionary trend of those years jazz. Roberto Arcuri, about that experience said, "Go and hear the term European Rhythm Machine, that was not a rival of no one, Phil Woods was a wonderful musician, super, which remained like that. "

Colossal music. My favorite album for this month.

If you find it, buy this album!