Don “Sugar Cane” Harris - Sugar Cane’s Got the Blues
Another in the recent batch of SPV-distributed new MPS reissues, this album by the Frank Zappa and Don & Dewey veteran violin master boasts yet another one of those line ups that’s impossible not to gawk at, Wolfgang Dauner, Robert Wyatt, either Volker Kriegel or Terje Rypdal on guitar, etc. The title will intimate that this is a blues album, but for sure this is definitely more of a jazz record, certainly it has a pretty down home feel at times, but musically the European aesthetic turns the four long tracks into something far less classifiable. Also, Harris is an extremely versatile player with quite a bit of edge to his style, sounding rough and ready one moment, lithe and sinuous another. I found it interesting that after I’d finished playing it that one of the songs being jammed was the Horace Silver classic “Song for my Father,” so I suppose it’s a testament to how rearranged it was that it didn’t even register. Overall, the album doesn’t have a feel that it was particularly thought out beforehand, relying mostly on the caliber of musicianship to move through the various songs. But it’s not the sort of virtuoso violin stylings that you’ll find with any number of violinists from Ponty to Urbaniak and Seifert, but something a lot more down home, with an almost Captain Beefheart-like roughness to the chemistry. Definitely one I’ll need a few more listens with to absorb properly.
Man - Live at the Padget Rooms, Penarth (expanded edition)
This is possibly my favorite Man album, not least because Man, especially around this period, were one of the world’s finest live bands, in fact their albums often don’t do them justice in terms of how utterly heavy and ferocious this band could be. Partially it’s because at this stage they didn’t have a keys player, so the sound is guitar heavy and at their most intense quite crunchy. While this new Esoteric version expands the albums to two discs, I think the total time was around 90-100 minutes in total with three long tracks per side and the second of the two discs the more substantially longer. But here you can hear the entire gig and the flow of the music from the spacier earlier pieces to the utterly monumental closing numbers, one you may remember from the original, the closer “Daughter of the Fireplace,” but pride of place goes to the gig’s penultimate “Romain” whose almost Black Sabbath like heaviness erupts into a siren towards the end. Honestly there are few live shows at this sort of caliber and after hearing the full gig I’d be hard pressed not to include this on a list of the best all time live shows. While the sound quality, from 8 track tapes, isn’t quite what you’ll get from the studio albums, maybe a tad muffly overall, the performance far outweighs those complaints. This is an absolute must, a classic performance from the greatest Welsh band who ever made music.
A. R. & Machines - Die Grune Reise - The Green Journey
This is one of those modern remasters that struck my ears as being cranked up too high and clipped, or at least it’s the first copy of Die Grune Reise that made me feel my ears were going to bleed. Which is too bad because this is a very groundbreaking album totally of its time. And while we have to give Reichel a lot of credit for his echo guitar experiements, I think the vocal work towards the end, which humorously apes the guitar sequences to great effect, might even be worth more attention. Everything about this is redolent of how free the era was, no boundaries and a totally unleashed experimentation. In fact to my ears, even though the next several Machines albums were quite fine, this is the best Reichel ever did in that mode, maybe because there’s still a bit of naivete to the work. There’s also a DVD here that I haven’t watched yet, which from the liner notes sounds like it was created for the music long after the fact, so I’m hoping maybe this version will balance the sonics better and be a little less like it’s being crammed through an era where loud productions and mastering are the standard.