RAY RUSSELL – Secret Asylum (LP-1973)

Label: Black Lion Records – 2460-207

Format: Vinyl, LP, Album / Country: UK / Released: 1973

Style: Contemporary, Free Jazz, Free Improvisation

Recorded in Studios Black Lion Records, 1973, London, Alan Bates Productions

Matrix / Runout (SIDE ONE): 2660207 A1

Matrix / Runout (SIDE TWO): 2660207 B2

Sound Advice By – Miki Dandy

Producer By – Bob Auger, Ray Russell

Recorded By – Bob Auger

Technician [Master Tape Transfer] – Ray Russell

A1 - Stained Angel Morning .................................................................... 1:11

A2 - Spinetree ......................................................................................... 6:08

A3 - Sweet Cauldron ............................................................................... 7:19

A4/A5 - All Through Over You - Nearer .................................................. 6:24

B1 - These That I Am .............................................................................. 7:08

B2 - To See Through The Sky ................................................................ 9:27

B3/B4 - There The Dance Is - Children Of The Hollow Dawn ................ 3:14

Performers:

Ray Russell – acoustic guitar, piano, electric guitar

Gary Windo – flute, saxophone, tenor saxophone

Harry Beckett – trumpet, flugelhorn

Daryl Runswick – bass

Alan Rushton – drums, percussion

Great work from the key years of British guitarist Ray Russell, the style here is quite free at times – Russell's guitar working in a quintet with Harry Beckett on trumpet and flugelhorn, Gary Windo on tenor and flute, Daryl Runswick on bass, and Alan Rushton on drums. Guitarist / composer Ray Russell was a dominant figure on the British Jazz scene in the late 1960s / early 1970s, making numerous seminal recordings as sideman and leader in a wide variety of styles ranging from Jazz-Rock Fusion, modern Jazz and even avant-garde Free Jazz.

Ray Russell is a composer whose wild explorations and sonic extensions of the electrified guitar set him aside from the famed British guitar heroes of the late '60s and '70s. Ray's rhythm and blues roots with The John Barry Seven, Georgie Fame, and the Graham Bond Organisation were set aside by the urgent call of the free jazz movement, and a succession of classic recordings (Turn Circle, Dragon Hill, Rites & Rituals, Live at the ICA, The Running Man) gave rise to his most challenging and ultimately rewarding suite of spectral sounds, the magnificent "Secret Asylum". All stretching out with energy that's similar to some of the freest moments in the Paris scene a few years before, inflected with some sharper, sometimes louder, edges from Russell's guitar – which is quite dark and fuzzy at points. Titles include "Stained Angel Morning", "There The Dance Is", "These That I Am", "All Through Over You", "Spinetree", and "Sweet Cauldron". As always, percussionist Alan Rushton batters beyond belief alongside the darting double bass of Daryl Runswick, with Harry Beckett playing inimitable figurines from his flugelhorn. The quintet is finalized by tenor titan Gary Windo who gives the last word in whirlwind intensity. Throughout the journey, "Secret Asylum" presents sonic caresses and searing assaults from all its featured participants, and its success has yet to be equalled...

"Secret Asylum" album shows him at the extreme edge of his work in the field of Free Jazz and is a wonderful example of the genre, similar to the work done earlier by John McLaughlin with John Surman on “Where Fortune Smiles”. Accompanied by a splendid group of musicians, Russell presents a series of his compositions, which vary from contemplative pieces to group improvisation mayhem, all performed splendidly. Beckett is more prominent on the quieter pieces and Windo leads the massive “wall of sound” sections, with his incredible virtuosity...

The album achieved little attention at the time of its release, but now 42 years after it was recorded, it can be really appreciated in full and in the proper historic perspective. Definitely worth checking out!

Enjoy!

If you find it, buy this album!

CHRIS McGREGOR'S BROTHERHOOD OF BREATH – Travelling Somewhere (Live-1973) – 2001

Label: Cuneiform Records – Rune 152
Format: CD, Album; Country: US - Released: 2001
Style: Free Jazz, Big Band
Recorded January 19th, 1973 at Lila Eule, Bremen, Germany.
Coordinator [Research And Release Coordination] – Steven Feigenbaum
Design – Bill Ellsworth
Engineer – Dietram Köster
Liner Notes – Mike Fowler
Mastered By [Premastering], Edited By – Matt Murman
Photography By – Jak Kilby
Producer – Peter Schulze

Travelling Somewhere consists of a concert recorded by Radio Bremen (Germany) on January 19, 1973, one week before the Chris McGregor & the Brotherhood of Breath show in Switzerland that would be released on Ogun in 1974 as Live at Willisau.

Personnel : Harry Beckett: trumpet; Mark Charig: trumpet; Nick Evans: trombone; Mongezi Feza: trumpet; Malcolm Griffiths: trombone; Chris McGregor: piano; Harry Miller: bass; Louis Moholo: drums; Mike Osborne: alto sax; Evan Parker: tenor sax; Dudu Pukwana: alto sax; Gary Windo: tenor sax.


BBC Review:

Ex-pat South African pianist McGregor made an immeasurable contribution to British and European jazz in the 1960's and 70's with his Blue Notes, a group of black South African jazz musicians whom the white bandleader hand-picked after hearing them perform at the 1962 Johannesburg Jazz Festival.

Opportunities for a mixed race group in South African being limited, to say the least, McGregor and his crew left their troubled homeland in 1964, and did most of their performing and recording in voluntary exile during the next twenty-five years. Several years after arriving in London with the Blue Notes, McGregor also assembled the Brotherhood of Breath, an ambitious avant garde big band which incorporated various members of the Blue Notes, along with the best of Great Britain's young jazzbos. McGregor struggled to keep the Brotherhood of Breath alive, and it performed sporadically over the years, with a revolving cast of musicians.

This CD documents an exceptional early live performance of the band, when they were at their creative peak. Perhaps because the United States has always been considered the ultimate repository of jazz talent, drummer Louis Moholo, alto saxophonist Dudu Pukwana and trumpeter Mongezi Feza have never really received critical attention commensurate with their abilities, but they were arguably as good as many of their more famous American counterparts. Put them together in a band with the young Evan Parker, Mark Charig, Gary Windo, Mike Osborne, Harry Beckett and Malcolm Griffiths (among others) and give them the energetic direction and compositional abilities of McGregor, and you have something very special.

Later editions of the Brotherhood might have been more sleek and refined, particularly in their studio incarnations, but there's an exuberant energy and density to these 1973 performances, recorded for Radio Bremen in front of a live audience, which at times reaches an almost ecstatic intensity. It's almost as if the Sun Ra Arkestra had been reconstituted in a parallel African reality.

Several pieces, particularly Pukwana's "MRA" and McGregor's "Do It," have the infectious and distinctive township highlife sound, the product of the cross-pollination of jazz and African dance rhythms. A seemingly simple, riff-based piece like "MRA' allows group members considerable latitude, as they improvise against the dominant riffs and develop counter-rhythms and melodies seemingly at will. The ragged collective improvisation periodically dissolves into chaos, only to reinvent itself and rise triumphantly from its own wreckage.

McGregor's "Restless" opens with the leader stating the quirky, Monkish theme on piano, and then showcasing Harry Beckett's eloquent trumpet and later, Pukwana's fiery alto sax. McGregor's "Ismite is Might" has the whole band wailing a slow, sonorous gospel dirge, which soon segues into "Kongi's Theme," a march-like piece with a stomping, second-line New Orleans beat. McGregor's "Wood Fire" starts with another Monkish figure, but soon extends into a freeform harmolodic mingling of multiple melody lines and patterns, making it clear that McGregor had absorbed some important ideas from Ornette Coleman. The title piece, another of McGregor's compositions, is primarily Pukwana's vehicle, as the band establishes a traditional swing groove with Pukwana's alto skittering and screeching over the top. Imagine Jimmy Lyons holding down the first alto chair in the Count Basie band, and you'll have some idea of this track's peculiar charms.

Cuneiform is to be commended for rescuing these tapes from the Radio Bremen archives, as the band's performance here is not just an important historical document, but even thirty-some years after the fact, a representation of some of the most vital and life-affirming big band jazz ever played by anyone, anywhere.

_  By Bill Tilland, 2002
http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/reviews/2bdp



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