Welcome to the penultimate post for June, which features some crispy Fusion footage of vintageness, to which all the enthusiasts of that sorta thing will surely groove and groove again.
Lookit that kit! It makes the SS Terry Bozzio seem like a Stray Cats audition, dunnit? No, Terry's kit is monumental at another level, but this guy here started the whole Drum Kit Olympus thing.
This is another one of those NRK-TV HD digital rebroadcasts I occasionally post; the Pentangle one at the end of May was one of them, and honestly I collect 'em all because they're all essential.
When this got posted on the NRK site, and then made into an FLV file shared on a torrent tracker, I about crapped my diaper. Spectrum footage???? From 1974????? You must be out of your Mahavishnu.
These are precisely the sort of things you'll see on American television at roughly the time the current (no he is not a man, even by the most basic primate definition) POTUS appoints Noam Chomsky to the newly-vacant Bernie Sanders seat on the Supreme Court.
Why that is may have something to do with the powers that be needing you and yours so unfunctionally moronic that anything with a cultural value above a Pet Rock must be excised, mocked and ignored in favor of more Romper Room for Alleged Adults.
This, that you and yours might be rendered into precisely the kind of knownothingly somnolent half-world state of consciousness necessary for your zombie ass to happily and compliantly accept the Late Stage Multinational Genocide-for-Profit Capitalism that will see your children completely and irreversibly dead by the age of 35.
I'd go into a tirade about that, but I do my best to keep this page free of such screeds and endeavor to stick to the music, because honestly no one here gives a single molecule of fly feces about what anyone else has to say about anything.
Anything that isn't directly related to delivering Daddy Pharoah's Godpaper into their pockets and their pockets alone, anyway. And all at the level of an eight-year-old child they insist is "credible" and "adult"... like Lord of the Flies with more facial hair, I guess.
Nope, not gonna do that. What I am gonna do is share this impeccably captured, high def half-hour of Norwegian television goodness, featuring one of the most astonishing drummers of our age leading perhaps his most famously blazing ensemble.
This one might be my personal favorite of these Norway jams, and it was taped precisely 44 years ago today. Watch out for the late John Abercrombie stroking the strings and those naughty Brecker Brothers keeping the horns suitably horny.
Billy Cobham's Spectrum
Kongsberg Jazz Festival
Kino
Kongsberg, Norway
6.28.1974
01 The Pleasant Peasant
02 Red Baron
03 Tenth Pinn
Billy Cobham - drums
Michael Brecker - saxophones
Randy Brecker - trumpet
John Abercrombie - guitar
Glenn Ferris - trombone
Milchu Leviev - keyboards
Alex Blake - bass
Total time: 34:27
HD FLV file of an NRK-TV web rebroadcast
596 MB FLV/June 2018 archive link
I'll return tomorrow with a (somewhat similar) last thing for the month, but right now Bill Cobham and his treetrunk drumsticks command you to increase your visual spectrum with this 34 minutes of scandalously Scandinavian Fusion burn!--J.
