NICHOLAS and GALLIVAN with LARRY YOUNG – Love Cry Want (1972) - 2LP, 2010

Label: Weird Forest Records – WEIRD-35
Format: 2 × Vinyl, LP, Reissue, Limited Edition; Country: US - Released: 2010
Style: Fusion, Jazz, Psychedelic Rock, Experimental, Free Improvisation
Recorded in June 1972, Lafayette Park, Washington DC.
Mixed By, Mastered By – Ed Mashal
Remastered By – Weasel Walter
Package design by Aaron Winters

Nicholas – prototype guitar synthesizer, ring modulator, wind, rain, thunder, lightning, water, hi-tension wires and wailing dervish
Joe Gallivan – drums, steel guitar, moog synthesizer, and percussion
Jimmy Molneiri – drums and percussion
Larry Young – Hammond organ.

A1  Peace (For Dakota And Jason)  7:04
A2  Tomorrow, Today Will Be Yesterday  5:08
B1  The Great Medicine Dance  9:25
B2  Angels Wing  4:46
C   Ancient Place  10:08
D   Love Cry  15:06

Nearly 40 years after its creation, Weird Forest is proud to release (2010) this seminal jazz album for the first time ever on vinyl. The incendiary grooves captured in this wax defy description. It is not free, jazz, funk, fusion or fire music, it encompasses all of these sounds and then blasts far beyond them. Featuring the late great organist, Larry Young (Miles Davis circa Bitches Brew, Tony Williams Lifetime, etc). Beautifully packaged, Weird Forest-style, in a deluxe double-gatefold cover and remastered for vinyl by Weasel Walter, the Love Cry Want 2xLP is an essential document of a criminally unheralded group. Here's the scoop:

June 1972.

The times were filled with darkness and turmoil. This music, of loving, of crying, of wanting, makes a powerful statement. It is awash with the anguish of the times, yet it heralds the promise of better days to come.

Love Cry Want was a legendary jazz fusion group based in Washington D.C., and led by guitarist, Nicholas. This recording took place during a series of concerts in Washington, held across from the White House in Lafayette Park, and featured the late, great jazz organist Larry Young, who had just recorded the historic Bitches Brew LP with Miles Davis and had left the Tony Williams Lifetime and guitarist John McLaughlin to combine forces with Nicholas and drummer, Joe Gallivan.

This second incarnation of Love Cry Want featured the triumvirate of Nicholas, Gallivan, and Young performing some of the most important music in the history of jazz. No record company would release this music, which was ahead of it's time.

Nicholas, who pioneered the development of the first guitar synthesizer (in association with Electronic Music Laboratories) performs on the first prototype guitar 'synth' along with fellow musician, Joe Gallivan, who pioneered the development of the drum synthesizer with inventor, Robert Moog.

June 1972, Lafayette Park.

Richard Nixon was President. There was a nasty war going on in Vietnam, good people were rioting in the streets and cities were aflame. During this series of concerts outside the White House, President Nixon ordered aide, J.R. Haldeman, to pull the plug on the concert fearing that this strange music would levitate the White House. This is that music, remastered for this first time-vinyl release by Weasel Walter.

(AAJ, January 13th, 2010)

This is one crazy, brilliant record. A trio composed of the inventor/guitarist Nicholas, who only ever went by his first name, drummer and steel guitarist Joe Gallivan, and the late organist Larry Young yielded one of the most intense, freewheeling, and visionary records ever to come out of the '70s fusion era -- even though it took until the 1990s to get released. Nicholas played not only electric guitar, but a prototype synthesizer guitar (he and the Electronic Music Laboratories created and patented the synth guitar) and used a ring modulator as well, adding to the textural and sonic possibilities of Young's already groundbreaking organ sounds. Each of the six tracks here begins with a mode, a rhythm, or a riff, and spirals into the stratosphere. Funk is the motivator on "Peace," where Young plays rhythmic counterpoint to Gallivan, while Nicholas wails his ass off all over the place. On "Tomorrow, Today Will Be Yesterday," a beautiful, long, droning guitar passage that seems to have come out of Jimi Hendrix's "Still Raining, Still Dreaming" sequence form Electric Ladyland is colored, shaded, and deepened by Young's chromatic abilities while Gallivan's drumming brings the two principals so close they are almost indistinguishable. And so it goes for one of most engaging, startlingly accessible free jazz fusion romps in history. The live feel of the music here is underscored by the fact that most, if not all of it, was recorded at various concerts. Whatever; this is one of those long-lost classics that needs to be heard by every succeeding generation of rock musicians who believe jazz harmonics and rhythmic elements have nothing to offer them, and by hipsters who can claim they knew about this back in the day.

_ Review by THOM JUREK



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HOPPER / DEAN / TIPPETT / GALLIVAN – Cruel But Fair (1977)

Label: Compendium Records – FIDARDO 4
Format: Vinyl, LP, Album; Country: Norway - UK pressing 1976, Released: 1977
Style: Experimental, Free Improvisation, Free Jazz
Recorded at The Basement, Oslo, October 1976 
A1, B1, B3 and B4 published by Warner Bros., otherwise by P.R.S.
Printed By – Garrod & Lofthouse
Made By – Garrod & Lofthouse
Recorded At – The Basement, Oslo
Bass – Hugh Hopper
Design, Photography – Laurie Lewis

Hugh Hopper - Bass
Elton Dean - Alto Saxophone & Saxello
Keith Tippett - Piano
Joe Gallivan - Drums, Percussion & Synthesizer

Hugh Hopper, who died of Leukaemia in 2009, started his musical career in 1963 as the bass player with the Daevid Allen Trio alongside drummer Robert Wyatt. There can be few other free jazz bands of the era with such a stellar line-up. Unlike other legendary ensembles such as The Crucial Three (a Liverpool band from 1977 which featured three musicians who were to go on to enormous success) the Daevid Allen Trio actually played gigs and made recordings. All three members ended up in Soft Machine, which together with Pink Floyd was the ‘ house band ’ of the burgeoning ‘ Underground ’ movement which tried so hard to turn British cultural mores upside down for a few years in the latter half of the 1960s. (Hopper and Wyatt had also been in another legendary Canterbury band called The Wilde Flowers). Hopper stayed with Soft Machine (for whom he was initially the group ’ s road manager) until 1973 playing at least one session with Syd Barrett along the way. During his tenure the band developed from a psychedelic pop group to an instrumental jazz rock fusion band, all the time driven by the lyrical bass playing of Hugh Hopper. After leaving the band he worked with many pillars of the jazz rock fusion scene such as: Isotope, Gilgamesh, Stomu Yamashta and Carla Bley. He also formed some co-operative bands with Elton Dean who had also been in Soft Machine. Previously Dean had been in a band called Bluesology, whose keyboard player Reginald Dwight had come to the conclusion that his was not a name that had much commercial potential, so he pinched Dean’s Christian name and as a surname chose part of the name of Bluesology’s lead singer, Long John Baldry.

HOPPER/DEAN/TIPPETT/GALLIVAN was an experimental jazz outfit formed in 1976 by former Hopper and Dean, teaming up with the renowned jazz pianist and composer Keith Tippett and the remarkable avant garde drummer/synth player Joe Gallivan. In 1977 the quartet released their album "Cruel but Fair", which Wally Stoup describes as: “ …a wide- ranging programme of bristling, exploratory jazz and innovative electronic music. Gallivan plays synthesiser in addition to his propulsive, pulse-oriented drums, and on several cuts ("Jannakota" and "Rocky Recluse"), the music drifts into beguiling electronic soundscapes. These serve as interludes for the more energetic and fiery pieces featuring Dean's singular sax and Tippett's dense, multi-layered piano. Dean's distinctive alto and the seldom-played saxello both project a plaintive, vocalised sound, equally adaptable to the frenzy of "Seven Drones" or the calm of "Echoes". This ability to shift emotional gears, shared by the group as a whole, results in a collective music that is both spontaneous and cohesive. “ I couldn ’ t have put it better myself.

_ By JON DOWNES



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