Passport Forwarding

I'm gonna go on ahead and pop one more thing up here for October, to make it an even ten.

I get that it's a big Rock Star birthday today, but honestly I get bored of the obvious, popular stuff after a while, so I will get to Grace Slick another time, I promise.

Today we'll continue with the Teutonic vibes begun by the Cluster set I posted for Roedi's 85th with this little taste of Germanic Jazz-Rock.

This set was taped 45 years ago today and features one of the toppermost Fusion bands of any nation.

Not only that, it's got two major superstars sitting in. One is guitar Maestro Philip Catherine, and the other is the perennially amazing vocalist from the great bands Frumpy and Atlantis, the electrifying Inga Rumpf.

Shhhhhh, don't tell anyone, but this show kind of completes a set, as similar LPs were released of the Klaus Doldinger all-star Jubilee concerts from 1973 and 1975.

Not this one, however.... but it was broadcast on the FM back in the day, and some gamely Teuton was at the ready with the very sort of magnetic recording tape invented by the Germans themselves!

Klaus Doldinger's Passport featuring Inga Rumpf 

NDR Jazzworkshop #104

Funkhaus

Hannover, Germany 

10.30.1974

01 Abracadabra

02 Nexus

03 Mr. Bigshot

04 Simple Song

05 Ready for Take Off

06 Rockport

Total time: 59:02 

Klaus Doldinger - soprano & tenor saxophones, clarinet & keyboards

Kristian Schultze - keyboards 

Philip Catherine - guitar

Wolfgang Schmid - bass

Curt Cress - drums

Inga Rumpf - vocals on Tracks 03-06

sounds like an off-air FM master reel capture

retracked with applause edited, volume boosted 1 dB throughout, and tape flip in Track 05 repaired by EN, October 2019

353 MB FLAC/October 2019 archive link

This show just cooks along, with two of the long jams Doldinger's group is famous for preceding the arrival of Inga Rumpf, who takes over the frontperson duties like she was onstage the whole time.

I am fixin' to bounce from this house here very soon -- in an operation I like to call Abandon Shit -- so if I don't post for awhile, stay tuned and if I don't die alone and homeless I'll be back ASAP to tune your tom-toms to a tasty tambre.

Do latch on to Doldinger's Passport though, and let them take you through customs on a Fusion voyage that represents the perfect pinnacle of "just about as funky as white people can get".--J.

Cluster Cloister: Roedelius 85

We'll finish up the anniversary celebration for my page's sixth b'day with this, a tribute to a great friend and an even greater and more important musician of our epoch.

Sometimes on here, I get to tribute someone I know or have met at some point, and today is one of those (scary!) days, knowing they'll see what I have to say.

The story of today's most esteemed honoree can't be told without the story of the aftermath of WWII, from the perspective of the children of Germany and Austria.

Some of those postwar youth must have wanted to kick their parents through the goalposts of Hell itself for what they'd allowed to occur, and they grew up in an even likelier position to rebel than their younger Baby Boom counterparts in other places, many of whom also desired to overthrow the previous order.

But, as Buckminster Fuller said, you don't overthrow a power structure or set of prevailing attitudes. You invent and implement a viable alternative and people run from the rotten paradigm into the new one.

Our hero of the day is one of the rare individuals who succeeded in doing just that, and in the process created both the conditions and content for a musical revolution that resonates powerfully to this day, and always will.

It's hard to pin down any big movement or cultural shift to one person, but more than any single human today's birthday boy created the genesis of the modern German music some people call Krautrock.

Of course there's tons of others, like Conny Plank and Michael Rother and more. 

But when Hans-Joachim Roedelius -- some call him Achim -- and fellow revolutionary Conrad Schnitzler set up the Zodiak Arts space in the Berlin of the late 1960s, they set into motion a series of creative links on the chain of things that blossomed into the full-on German Rock genre the world knows and loves today.

That isn't the end of his contribution though... no, not at all. The real substance of his work is of course his one-of-a-kind, uncategorizably beautiful music of these last 50 years, and the seminal bands he's been a part of that have inspired some of the most far-ahead folks to change and evolve their own.

Chief among these projects was Cluster, his duo with fellow electronic pioneer Dieter Moebius, another formative figure of the firmament of this stuff.

The influence of this group over musicians the world over, from Brian Eno to David Bowie to Julian Cope to just about anyone you could name, can't even begin to be quantified in the slightest.

A supreme melodic piano deity, his compositions capture something entirely outside -- yet completely within -- the gift of the moment in which they are heard, speaking to a pastoral human-ness that transcends mere temporal barriers and perceptions of the passage of time.

I met him after a concert he and a collaborator gave in San Francisco in 2010, at the afterparty for the show, and he gave me the single best hug I ever received from another person.

To celebrate and honor this extraordinary cat -- born this day in 1934! -- we have perhaps the single greatest unissued Cluster performance there is, and it's criminally undercirculated too.

Cluster

Joan Miró Foundation

Barcelona, Spain

9.15.1994

01 Part 1a

02 Part 1b

03 Part 2a

04 Part 2b

Total time: 1:08:07

Hans-Joachim Roedelius - piano, samplers & synthesizers

Dieter Moebius - synthesizers, sequencers, electronic percussion & processing

master cassette of a DAT from the soundboard

declipped & retracked by EN, October 2019
294 MB FLAC/October 2019 archive link

So there you have it. I think we'll leave October there, unless I whip out an additional post next week to make an even ten for month ten. Like I said I dunno if I will be doing this for a while, and I may have to get outta dodge and flee the place in which I live, but we shall see.

But before I go, I want to say thank you to Achim Roedelius for the lifetime of Earth-altering music and ideas, and for being a friend. And may he live to be 185 to continue to do what he does <3 --J.

Blissness Six: Ogun Squad

Sorry this is late but I had to go carry my laundry around in the black wildfire air, and I'm trying to abandon the mordant shithole in which I live and find new housing, which is harder than fuck, especially on your birthday.

I also apologize for missing Yes minstrel Jon Anderson's 75th birthday today, but I mistakenly thought he was born in 1946 and was thus two turns away from that milestone. I'll get to him another time, promise.

To celebrate this page being 6 and me being 53, we have a short-but-stomping 35 minutes of British Jazz, shared here to complete an officially released record of part of the concert with the remainder.

This one was recorded in 1984, but the issued portion was not released until 1986.

This segment has remained in the vaults, but was aired over the radio in Europe back when it was performed, so somebody snagged it off the FM when it was first broadcast.

It depicts a wild septet outing, with one foot in the Free and one in the traditional, led by a stalwart pianist whose records and contributions to others' albums have always rated high on my list.

He's led a ton of sessions and been a part of two tons more since the late 1960s.

His name is Keith Tippett and he's surely the only Free Jazz guy ever to appear on Top of the Pops.

That was in 1970, when he was a satellite player in the Avant Prog adventists we know as King Crimson. 

I guess that's how I was introduced to him, from those early 1970s KC platters like In the Wake of Poseidon and Lizard, the latter surely the weirdest record ever to make the Top 10 and one that Mr. Tippett essentially dominates.

His own stuff -- and he once fronted, from the piano, a 50-piece jazz orchestra called, fittingly, Centipede -- treads the line between Fusion and Free, with a healthy dose of traditional Hard Bop and Modal vibes.

So here comes this one, taped 35 years ago today in the UK.

Keith Tippett Septet

Barnfield Theatre

Exeter, UK

10.25.1984

1st set:

01 Thoughts to Geoff

02 Dedicated to Mingus

03 Sketch 2

Total time: 34:17

Keith Tippett - piano

Larry Stabbins - tenor & soprano saxophones

Elton Dean - alto saxophone & saxello

Marc Charig - cornet & tenor horn

Nick Evans - trombone

Paul Rogers - double bass

Tony Levin - drums & percussion

Hi-Fi VHS capture of the original FM broadcast of the 1st set

Track 03 channel dropout repaired by EN, October 2019

2nd set released on Ogun Records in 1986 as

"A Loose Kite In a Gentle Wind, Floating with Only My Will for an Anchor"

203 MB FLAC/October 2019 archive link

I will be back tomorrow with what might be the last post here for some time. I don't know what the future holds and I can't do this work homeless.

But do enjoy this bit of the Keith Tippett Septet, and of course feel encouraged if not demanded to support these fine artists and buy the released portion right here.--J.

Bass Ball Stanniversary

We have arrived, it seems, at the sixth anniversary of this page, which as we know is on my 53rd birthday tomorrow.

So to celebrate, we have three posts in a row for Thursday through Saturday, beginning with the 40th b'day of this hour of bass molestation and Fusion filigree.

Our hero of the day should need minimal if any introduction, as he has been one of the ten best living practitioners of his chosen instrument since his advent in the early 1970s.

Of course he was in a big mega-famous Jazz-Rock combo and so forth, but today's show dates from after that time, as the Seventies came to a close and he was mostly a solo artist.

This set finds the man in tandem with drum deity Simon Phillips, to form a rhythm section I will only describe as muscular, to say the least.

They lay the foundation for a blazing hour, with the soloists flying high over the top.

What is there else to say? He's a living god of the bass, his name is Stanley Clarke, and he even sings a bit in this show.

Stanley Clarke 
Rainbow Theater 
Denver, Colorado USA 
10.24.1979

01 Hymn to the Seventh Galaxy 
02 Rock 'n' Roll Jelly
03 Silly Putty
04 Goodbye Pork Pie Hat/band introductions
05 School Days
06 I Want to Play for You
07 Lopsy Lu
08 Life Is Just a Game

Total time: 57:19

Stanley Clarke - bass & vocals
Steven Bach - keyboards
Simon Phillips - drums
Charles Icarus Johnson - guitar
Alfred Williams - saxophone
Al Harrison - trumpet
Al Blinkley - trumpet
Dale Devoe - trombone

DAT of original pre-FM reels
slightly retracked by EN, October 2019
340 MB FLAC/October 2019 archive link

This is a thermonuclear set and if you like this kind of thing you can't be without it, trust me. Especially sourced from the tasty pre-broadcast tapes like this.

Stay tuned tomorrow for a short but sweet taste of British Jazz for my and my page's birthday tomorrow!--J.