Barney Wilen & His Amazing Free Rock Band - Dear Prof. Leary

The album cover of Dear Prof. Leary uses flashing colors, a green on red design that makes the title of the album wobble in true psychedelic fashion. No matter what one thinks of MPS and jazz rock, this one’s announcing something more in common with the rock scene of the time than jazz music, despite the pedigree of the musicians. Interesting to see French guitarist Mimi Lorenzini on board, readers may recognize him from his late 70s fusion group Edition Speciale or other similar projects. You also get Joachim Kuhn on keys, Aldo Romano and Wolfgang Paap on drums, Gunter Lenz on bass and the leader on saxes. However, the band seems to play as two trios. You have Paap on the left for the beats and Romano on the right for the freer material and often the two diverge for quite a bit of cacaphony.

Musically this starts with a lot of different tunes from the era, both soul (”Why Do You Keep Me Hanging On” and “Respect”) and pop (The Beatles’ “The Fool on the Hill”). If you add a couple originals and Ornette Coleman’s “Lonely Woman,” you’ve got the whole record and despite the different source materials, the album is quite consonant as a whole. Generally the musicians play the themes and then go berserk, time and time again, making it quite a bit different from the same sort of method soul jazzers like Grant Green were using, the vamp and the jam. The whole thing is overlaid by great psychedelic excess, heavy almost Jon Lord-like organ, freaky wah wah guitars by Lorenzini and the warm sax tone you’d expect from a band like Xhol Caravan. The music grooves like some psych beat monster but it always gives a way to bountiful noise and shredding, as if Brotzmann or Braxton was doing a late 60s song book with Booker T and the MGs as backing band.

Overall it’s not really quite what you’d expect. The cover screams the 60s, the line up a great jazz combo, the song line up a mix and the overall approach one of heavy rock. Strangely all these threads converge in a style almost perfect for MPS, American jazz gone European style, deconstructing a lot of familiar tunes until you would barely recognize them. I’ve always considered Kuhn to be a fairly mellow player for the most part, so it’s great to hear him really let loose on the organ here. While the occasional free sax outburst might scare some potential listeners away, be assured that this is far more a rock release than most of what MPS puts out and is likely to appeal as much to the psych/freak out collector than the jazz crowd. It’s a gem well worth rediscovering.