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Chris Spedding - lost jazz album (re)-emerges


RogerF

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Before Chris Spedding abandoned jazz in favour of pop and rock, he made some significant contributions to British jazz on albums by the likes of Mike Gibbs, Mike Westbrook, Jack Bruce and of course, Nucleus.So it's good news to hear that the jazz album he made but never released (because it coincided with the start of his rock career) Songs Without Words is now being (re)issued on the Hux label. It was actually released naughtily in Japan but apparently it had not been sanctioned by Spedding or for that matter properly mixed. This Hux version has been properly re-mixed and edited down by him and features amongst others John Marshall and the late Paul Rutherford on trombone. Full details are here: Songs Without Words

 

Edited by RogerF
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I'd like to hear that.

There are some funny stories of Spedding not fitting in with the jazz musicians he was playing with in the early 70s. Lovely one about the Mike Gibbs band where tensions were rising. The band turned up for a gig all dressed down. Spedding arrives in a pink suit! 

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There's a funny story about this album - it was supposed to have lyrics, vocals and all this stuff, but - to Chrises surprise - there was just instrumental session released with no add-ons.

And lucky us! Have you heard "Backwood Progression" or "The Only Lick I Know"? The first one is, well, let's say accetable, but the latter is just awful.

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You get some idea of the differences of outlook between Spedding and the jazz world of the early 70s on his website.

The bit about the Nucleus composition '1916' made me smile. The different perspectives of Spedding and Carr are almost a mirror of the 'prog'/punk wars of 1976/7. 

...we had a thing that we used to rehearse when I first joined the band, and one bar of this particular piece had this strange time signature of 1916. So we came to refer to the piece as 1916, and it became a number on the album - 1916. But such is the state of Ian Carr's mind that he managed to convince himself that this song had been inspired 1916 Easter Revolution in Ireland, and he found a poem by Yeats on this subject, and on the following album he recited this poem over 1916. I said 'don't you think that's a bit pretentious Ian. do you have to have a literary justification for everything you do? ...' I'm not going to play a song and pretend that this song is 1916 the year, because I know it's about 1916 the time signature. That's pretentious. So I said 'I'm walking. I can't believe you guys would do this.

http://www.chrisspedding.com/bio/bio3.htm

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I've just been listening to Mike Gibbs' Just Ahead and Chris Spedding's contribution is astoundingly good. But like the old joke goes, what's  the difference between a rock guitarist and a jazz guitarist? One plays 3 chords to thousands, the other plays thousands of chords to 3 people.

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Spedding is one of my absolute favorite guitarists (due in large part to his participation on Jack Bruce's early solo projects + The Battered Ornaments--whose two proper albums rank among the more idiosyncratic blends of free jazz and rock). This record has been a holy grail of mine for ages, despite the fact that Spedding has sort of disavowed it--I will most definitely be checking this out.

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It all depends on what kind of Spedding you want IMO.

Back in the late 70s when (neo-)rockabilly Robert Gordon all of a sudden hit the charts and had some relatively successful albums, Chris Spedding worked a lot with him and there were quite a few bootleggish cassette dubs of Robert Gordon concerts around that feature quite amazing, straightforward, no-frills Chris Spedding playing. No idea if any of these have made it to more regular releases since.

Edited by Big Beat Steve
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this was my first exposure to Spedding in 1975 followed by the two Vertigo Nucleus LP's (what a contrast) - couldn't work out whether he was taking the piss with this single - still I have a soft spot for this - the bike he is riding (BMW 75/5)  in the film clip is my current motorcycle

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I admit, I haven't spent as much time with "iconic thug rocker" Chris Spedding, though I enjoy much of what I've heard. There was a beef mentioned in the Jack Bruce biography regarding Spedding's alleged distaste for the more complex/less-accessible music that he was playing prior to his "turn" to more explicit rockisms (I'd grab the quote, but I don't have the book in front of me), but Spedding has made it clear in subsequent years that he didn't intend to decry the music he made with Jack. (Though he apparently despises Songs Without Words, for the reasons mentioned above.)

For pre-Motor Bikin' Spedding, the aforementioned Ricotti and Westbrook albums are great, as are his contributions to Nucleus. For my money, though, his playing on both Songs for A Tailor and Harmony Row is some of the clearest, most organic playing in the jazz-rock/prog/fusion canon. The Battered Ornaments stuff is more all over the place and messy, but (due to internal baggage) he makes most of the major vocal (and many of the instrumental) contributions to Mantle-PIece, and it's kind of a low-intensity classic. I think the synergy with Pete Brown was real and exciting, and it gave Spedding's semi-primitivist Curtis Mayfield/Hendrix shtick some real contextual heft.

Edited by ep1str0phy
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