"Born With the Caul" - Cian Nugent and the Cosmos

Cian Nugent's Born With the Caul is very much a slow burn. It takes its time to deliver but deliver it surely does. Released at the end of 2013, I first heard it about 6 months ago and it didn't really hit. But after regular playings it has grown on me and I now reckon it's one of the great psychedelic guitar rock albums of recent years. Nugent's group is aptly named as their music is good old fashioned cosmic music - the psychedelia of the the desert, the night and wide open spaces. After careful listening it reveals itself to be well in the tradition of the Pink Floyd at their spaciest and the Grateful Dead at their most freewheeling.

24 year-old Cian Nugent hails from Dublin and has been playing solo acoustic folk guitar for a few years now. He also plugs in with his electric band, the Cosmos, who include Ailbhe Nic Oireachtaigh on electric viola, Conor Lumsden on bass, Brendan Jenkinson on organ and David Lacey on drums. Their sound is a mixture of Celtic folk, jazz and psychedelic rock. They've recently been on tour with Ryley Walker (a perfect double bill if ever there was one). Nugent has recorded before but Born With the Caul is this line-up's first release.


The album references acoustic blues and late 60s psychedelia - especially early Doors, the Grateful Dead, the Pink Floyd, early 70s Fairport Convention and John Cale era Velvet Underground. However this is an album that very much stands on its own two feet. This is not a nostalgic revival. The music here sounds fresh and very much alive.

A 3 track album clocking in at 45 minutes - nice LP length - Born With the Caul slowly navigates its way towards its thunderous and triumphant finale. Opening acoustic track Grass Above My Head starts off sounding like a lament but soon morphs into a kind of Irish folk version of a New Orleans style funeral celebration. The acoustic intro on Double Horse seems to pick up from the previous track's motif but quickly leads in to a droning eastern style raga sound. Given the previous cut's theme, is this some kind of meditation on the hereafter? Nugent spins a couple of riffs that bring to mind Robbie Kreiger's intro on The Doors' The End. The keyboards also give it the eerie atmosphere of early Doors. This is classic desert heat haze psychedelia. Indian territory. Ominous and strange. The ghost of Jim Morrison lurks and we get a hint of danger on the edge of town. Of course this is a terrain also explored by the Grateful Dead on Dark Star and by the Quicksilver Messenger Service on The Fool or especially side 2 of Happy Trails but this is also rich prospecting territory and Nugent's band convincingly stake their own claim.

The mood is enhanced by Ailbhe Nic Oireachtaigh's viola accompaniment which blends with Nugent's guitar without getting in the way of it. Some people have compared this album to Fairport Convention for its use of guitar and viola but I'm not really hearing that. If anything, it's more like John Cale's restrained use of viola in the Velvet Underground. Think of Cale's droning contribution to Venus in Furs and you get an idea of what a rich strange mix this is. The rhythm section is also excellent. David Lacey's jazzy drums are superb throughout. Towards the end Nugent's guitar takes on an angular repetitive riff similar to something Jerry Garcia might have come up with around 1969. The Grateful Dead references are quite apt. This ranks alongside some of the Dead's finest improvised work-outs from the late 60s.

Final track Houses of Parliament is the big one. It starts off rewinding back into the desert heat haze of the previous piece but then suddenly morphs into something far more Floydian. Built up from smaller pieces in to a larger whole it has the scope of the Floyd at their finest. Nugent also plays with the same subtle economy that David Gilmour had - there is no noodling here. We soon head into a relaxed funk riff reminiscent of the mid section in the Floyd's Echoes but David Lacey's drums add a jazzy groove that the Floyd never really managed. An abrupt tempo change and the band drives helter skelter towards the song's finale with unbridled punk energy and panache. Finally Nugent kicks in spinning a riff reminiscent of the Grateful Dead's China Cat Sunflower. It sounds triumphant. A joyous homecoming.

This is an album that has a clean live feel. The band actually sound like they recorded it live in the studio with few overdubs and very little in the way of effects. It is also an an old-fashioned "album" in the sense that it is best listened to as a complete whole. This is not designed to be divided up and downloaded in marketable bite form. It's a superb work worthy of its influences and which very much continues their spirit. Give it your time. Slow burner it may be but when it hits you'll be richly rewarded.


The preview below doesn't really do the album justice. It is, as I say, best experienced as a complete album. But if you really want a sonic idea...






More stranger than known
Celestial Voices - The Pink Floyd live at the Paradiso, Amsterdam 1969

Parallax - The Pink Floyd BBC Sessions

Fairport Convention Bouton Rouge Sessions 

Freak Out! In praise of Improv

The Grateful Dead - 1969 Dark Star set to vintage film ...

What is Bebop? - The Subject is Jazz

NBC's "The Subject is Jazz" was a 1958 TV show hosted by Gilbert Seldes and was the first television series to give jazz serious attention. The 13-part series was produced by the new National Educational Television Network (NET) and guests included Duke Ellington, Aaron Copland, Bill Evans, Cannonball Adderley, Jimmy Rushing and Langston Hughes. Each thirty minute episode focused on a specific genre of jazz, including swing, cool, and bebop.

The Bebop episode featured pianist and composer Billy Taylor as the Musical Director and also included Cannonball and Nat Adderley.

Billy gives detailed explanation of the bebop form which he sees as an extension of Swing and the band run through exemplary versions of "Bebop" "A NIght in Tunisia" and Round Midnight". Cannonball Adderley also discusses the "indescribable" Charlie Parker."

Interesting factoid; according to Gilbert, "Charlie Parker was said to have sustained 360 notes a minute against the usual 170 and was still swinging".

Billy Taylor - Billy Taylor talks about Bebop on MUZU.TV.

stranger than known

"Cool" - BBC Arena documentary

The Horace Silver Quintet - "Song for My Father" on Danish TV 1968

Ronnie Scott and All That Jazz

Freak Out! In praise of Improv

© David Mainwood

Rock Improvisation?

OK. Maybe it could sound like an awful racket but what's wrong with that? It's rock music. It's supposed to be rowdy. Back before rock became predictable corporate big business it was quite often the done thing for bands to alienate the more conservative sections of their mainstream audience by dropping all pretense of form or melody and heading off into full ahead warp drive jamming mode - occasionally for quite long periods of time.

Cream, Jimi Hendrix, the Grateful Dead, the Soft Machine, Tangerine Dream, even The Pretty Things (see below)... All would embrace improv in some way during live performances. After all they were a generation schooled on blues and jazz experimentation and progression.

So bands might take off on an extended 12 bar riff and the guitarist might show off a bit. However, if you were really lucky, like on say Hendrix's Voodoo Chile (long version) on Electric Ladyland or the Grateful Dead's Dark Star, the musicians would listen to and communicate with each other in order to develop a theme or an idea and the results would be truly spectacular. Of course they weren't just making it all up as they went along. There was structure but space was left for the musicians to explore the variations that could be thrown up by the riffs and changes within the song. There was a rough map. But you don't always have to take the same route to get to where you're going do you?

In a lot of cases the results may not have been so successful but whatever happened to that spirit of adventure? By the 1980s a kind of musical post-punk puritanism held sway over the UK indie scene and with it came the belief that guitar solos were the work of the devil and that any kind of jamming was mere ego wanking. The great John Peel may even been partly responsable for this as his radio show had a massive influence on the 80s indie scene in the UK and by then Peel was not a great fan of this somewhat lengthier form of musical adventure.

This, I think, was a form of musical puritanism and it held sway over the UK indie movement for too long. As a result UK rock became predictable, safe and rather backward looking. Puritan indeed. If the UK wasn't making guitarists of the stature of Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton and Peter Green anymore, that's why.

In the 90s the US had a jam band scene of whom Phish were probably the most successful but in comparison with some of the bands featured below they seemed a little anodyne to me.

So, anyway, here are a few of my favourite examples of bands who abandoned all pretence of musical health and safety, took a risk and jumped over the edge into the improv ether and just occasionally found true inspiration...





The Pretty Things - Why?
Let's start off on reasonably safe ground with the Pretty Things doing a version of the Byrds' Why in Germany in 1969. Surprisingly for a band best known for its SF Sorrow rock opera the Pretty Things also liked a bit of a jam. R'n'B colleagues the Yardbirds were probably the band that most popularized the idea of bashing a few chords and letting the lead guitarist wail over screeching feedback when they let Jeff Beck loose on their I'm A Man single. The Who did something similar on Anyway Anyhow Anywhere where the guitar solo section is basically freeform noise and feedback. And they got that into the top 10! 
Why has a certain droning element which lends itself to extended freak-outs and here the Pretties take it all the way.

The Butterfield Blues Band Live at the Whisky A Go-Go, Hollywood California,1966
A breathtaking version of East / West. One of the first and greatest rock improvised pieces of the 1960s. According to writer Joel Selvin they had a massive influence on the direction San Francisco bands like the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane would take after playing there in late 1965.

The Soft Machine live on Dutch(?) TV in 1967 with Kevin Ayers. One of the geat jazz influenced improv bands of the late 60s and probably the best UK exponents of the art. They quite often just improvised their way through whole sets.

Cream - NSU at the Grande Ballroom, Detroit, October 15th 1967.
Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker were musicians raised on jazz. Cream had ruled the roost in the UK in 1966 but by now were being upstaged by the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Eric Clapton had to raise his game to respond. Here he plays some of the most inspired music of his career. This is Cream at their competitive and thunderous best. Hold tight...

Jimi Hendrix - Red House live at the San Diego Sports Arena, May 24, 1969.
One of Hendrix's best ever performances and, for me, easily the best version of this song. The solo has structure and develops. Hendrix played this at every show and there may be hundreds of versions of this song so it would have been easy for him to churn out the crowd pleasing cliches but he didn't. He followed the muse and, jazzy interludings and all, the execution here is superb. Hendrix has the chops and the ideas. He knows what he wants and by golly he nails it.

Tangerine Dream Bath Tube Session
Filmed 1969 in the Ruins near Potsdamer Platz this is very early pre-synth Tangerine Dream when they still used guitars and is really quite spectacular. There is no song at all just extended jamming. This is really freeform rock. Musical spontaneous combustion. 1-2-3-go! And the first one to the end is the winner.

The Grateful Dead - The Eleven 
October 12, 1968 at the Avalon Ballroom, San Francisco, California.

This is it. Stunning. Sublime. The finest rock jamming you'll hear. Played in an 11/8 time signature hence its title. It's like speeding down the motorway at night with no brakes. Scary but veryf exhilarating. Listen to those drummers! Jerry Garcia really swings. What is holding this together? I get goosebumps when I listen to this.

This piece should really be listened to within the context of the 40 minute non-stop Dark Star > St Stephen > The Eleven > Death Don't Have No Mercy set that the Dead regularly played at this time. Check out the full show here
http://archive.org/details/gd1968-10-12.sbd.miller.86759.sbeok.flac16

The Dead were the real masters of improvisation in the late 60s. They played on acid and believed in the egoless concept of a musical "group mind" which would direct the flow of the music. In fact the band would romp their way through some pretty wild and intense music around 1968 - 69 and it begs the question that, although performed with electric guitars and drums, given the complexities, is this still rock music or the did the Dead come up with something else entirely?

The Grateful Dead - 1969 Dark Star set to vintage 1950s San Francisco film

The Grateful Dead's Dark Star is one of the finest group instrumental improvisations of the rock era.

Dark Star is a sort of enormous musical riverscape that flows, meanders, occasionally becalms, and finally regathers itself to provide an always exhilarating trip through the rapids down to the sea.

It evolved during performances mainly from 1968 to 1974. It started off as reasonably short instrumental but by the early 70s it had grown into a sprawling beast of a thing that varied from jazzy syncopation to intense freeform meltdown.

The most famous Dark Star is probably the one on the band's 1969 Live / Dead album however my own favourite Dark Stars are the 1970 ones. Anyone familiar with the Live / Dead version will notice the change in form and mood. The 1970 Dark Stars are nearly all tightly structured, gorgeously melodic, and rather cheerful and sunny affairs that lack any of the darkness and occasional noodling of the later (and longer) 1972 -74 ones.

So, here's a nice short (20 minutes) version that, although not as majestic as some of the later 1970 Dark Stars (check out the sublime 14th February 1970 Fillmore East version on Dicks Picks Vol 4), does feature some lucid Jerry Garcia lead. The jam in the second half is particularly joyful. This is chill-out and pick-you-up music.

It's also nicely set here to this vintage 1950s film of San Francisco directed by Tullio Pellegrini. This is the San Francisco the Dead grew up in. Full of vintage cars, trams, behatted pedestrians, and even a visit to the zoo.
Whoever is responsible well done!

Shall we go?


Grateful Dead - Dark Star Live at Thelma Theater, Los Angeles on 11th December 1969

Listen to the full show here
Grateful Dead at the Thelma Theater, Los Angeles - 11th December 1969
from archive.org http://archive.org/details/gd69-12-11.sbd.gerland.10987.sbeok.shnf

The original film 
from archive.org

Ronnie Scott and All That Jazz

A 1989 BBC Omnibus documentary on Ronnie Scott filmed on the 30th anniversary of the club he founded in Soho, London with tenor sax player Pete King.

The documentary features footage of Zoot Sims, Sonny Rollins, Dizzy Gillespie, Ella Fitzgerald and interviews with Pete King, Stan Tracy, Mel Brooks and also a couple of young Westminster MPs called Ken Clarke and John Prescott. Both united here in order to show how jazz brings together people of opposing political views, however both claim in the interview is this is the closest is they have ever sat together.

Ronnie Scott often acted as club MC was famous for his repertoire of jokes and one-liners. "Our next guest is one of the finest musicians in the country. In the city, he's crap". Of the club he once said, "It's easy to make a million running a jazz club. Just start with two million". "I love this place, its just like home. Filthy and full of strangers" and "it was very quiet last night, we had the bouncers chucking people IN. A guy rang up and asked 'what time does the show start?' I said, what time can you get here? No but I really love this place, its made a very happy man old."

There is even a blog dedicated to Ronnie's humourous asides here The Ronnie Scott Jokes Page

After Ronnie's death in 1996, Pete King continued to run the club for a further nine years, before selling it in 2005.

Eight Miles High on bagpipes - Rufus Harley

A few weeks back, I posted a solo acoustic performance of Asturias > Eight Miles High by Roger McGuinn, and commented about how a version of the song on bagpipes would be something to hear.

Well sure enough, such a recording exists. Jazz bigpiper Rufus Harley, who recorded for Atlantic Records in the 60s, played with Sonny Rollins in the 70s and guested on Laurie Anderson's 1982 Big Science album, recorded a version of Eight Miles High on bagpipes for his 1970 Atlantic album Kings / Queens.

Harley, who was of Cherokee descent and sometimes performed in Scottish kilts, got interested in the bagpipes when he saw the funeral of John F. Kennedy on TV and was moved by the sound of the Black Watch bagpipe band.

According to Harley's New York Times obituary, his son Messiah said “My dad was playing a lot of tenor sax then but because Coltrane and Rollins were smoking the sax, that’s why he turned to the bagpipes.”


Take a listen.
Rufus Harley, bagpipes; Richard Tee, piano; Eric Gale, guitar; Charles Rainey, bass; Jimmy Johnson, drums; Montego Joe, conga drum; Nadi Qamar, mamalukembia & Madagascar harp.

 

The Horace Silver Quintet - "Song for My Father" on Danish TV 1968

"Song for My Father" has one of the greatest opening bass lines. It was famously borrowed by Steely Dan for "Rikki Don't Lose That Number".

Not only that but Earth Wind & Fire also pinched it for the intro for "Clover" and Stevie Wonder used the opening horn riff for "Don't You Worry 'Bout a Thing".

So Horace must have been owed a bob or two.

"Song for My Father" was the title track of the Blue Note album originally released in 1965 but here is a mammoth 18 minute version recorded live for Jazz Omkring Midnat on Denmark TV in April 1968 featuring;

Horace Silver - Piano
Bill Hardman - Trumpet
Bennie Maupin - Tenor
John Williams - Bass
Billy Cobham - Drums

I'd love to know if there is any more of this show . Any ideas on precise dates and background info welcome too.

 

Fairport Convention Bouton Rouge Sessions - The British Jefferson Airplane Takes Off

The wonderful performance below is from the French TV Show "Bouton Rouge". It was broadcast live on 27 April 1968 and features the original Fairport Line up of Judy Dyble, Iain Matthews, Simon Nicol, Tyger Hutchings, Richard Thompson, and the late Martin Lamble playing Morning Glory, Time Will Show The Wiser and a simply awe-inspiring mind-melting performance of Reno, Nevada.

Fairport Convention in 1968

At this time Fairport had just released their first album and were very influenced by American folk rock and psychedelic groups like Jefferson Airplane, Bob Dylan and The Byrds. The sound, look and name of the band led many to think that either they were an American band or at best just a British version of Jefferson Airplane.

The star of the show is definitely Richard Thompson who is seen here in mega guitar hero role. After a fairly muscular solo in Morning Glory he delivers an astonishing perfectly paced 4 and a half minute six string marathon in Reno Nevada - so full of power, invention, imagination that the solo seems to run away with itself. Is Richard playing the guitar or is the guitar playing Richard? For the duration of this nearly 5 minute solo they are no longer the British Jefferson Airplane copying their heroes but arguably go beyond anything the Airplane, Grateful Dead or other San Francisco bands were doing in early '68 (although it must be said that the Dead would start to achieve similar high levels of  jazz inspired improv syncopation before the year was out but that is another story and post).

And to top it all the band just look so damned cool. As the solo finishes Judy Dyble slowly gets up and wanders back to the microphone and the whole band just have a look of Hey this is nothing special. We are this shit hot every night. The epitome of cool...

After this performance they signed with Island Records, Judy Dyble left the band to be replaced by Sandy Denny and they went off to reinvent British folk rock.

Watch and wonder...
(Thompson's solo is from 08:30 to 13:05)

More Bouton Rouge sessions http://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1CoY8JtBNlU3hGVUJfuYXA

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The Faster We Go...