AOTW March 5th-11th

[Guest akanalog]

Hello. Nucleus' "Solar Plexus" is the album of the week.

All this talk of the Cellar Door Sessions made me think it would be a good idea to highlight an album of what was going on across the Atlantic at just about the same time. Though my copy does not have a recording date, I believe "Solar Plexus" was first released in late 1970, about when Miles Davis and crew were headed to the Cellar Door.

It is Saturday night and I am going to get some dinner. But this is the AOW coming up tommorow.

[Guest akanalog]

recorded 12/14 and 12/15 1970. so actually almost exactly concurrent to the Cellar Door!

[Guest akanalog]

ok no one has anything to say so far i guess so i will talk with myself-

i wanted to choose a nucleus album for this AOW and my first thoughts were "we'll talk about it later" or "labyrinth". i always felt "solar plexus' never totally worked for me, but thinking about the albums i realized that just about every song on "solar plexus" has stuck in my head for the year or so i have owned the album. so despite thinking it was not a favorite album of mine, the compositions really struck me i guess and have stayed in my brain. the themes themselves are pretty simple, but, and this is not something i would generally say is a compliment, but the business of the instruments really gives the themes interesting depth. the best example of this might be the final track, "snakehips dream". the song is 15 mintues long, and is really built on nothing more than a simple little bass riff, but the work of the bassists jeff clyne and ron mathewson, especially, really keep the listener on guard. i guess it is cliche to talk about ever musician soloing and none soloing at once, which i guess is attributed to joe zawinul, but i think it rings true on this album.

"solar plexus" contains a whos who of progressive jazz musicians of the time.

in fact this is a good time to give this info-

Track listing

1. Elements I & II (2:12)

2. Changing Times (4:44)

3. Bedrock Deadlock (6:52)

4. Spirit Level (9:20)

5. Torso (6:12)

6. Snakehips Dream (15:16)

Line-up

- Ian Carr / trumpet, flugelhorn

- Karl Jenkins / oboe, Baritone Saxophone, E-piano, piano

- Brian Smith / Tenor Saxophone, Soprano saxophone, flute

- Chris Spedding / guitar

- Jeff Clyne / bass, contrabass

- John Marshall / drums, percussion

- Kenny Wheeler / trumpet, flugelhorn

- Harry Beckett / trumpet, flugelhorn

- Tony Roberts / Tenor saxophone, bass clarinet

- Ron Matthewson / bass

- Chris Karan / percussion

- Keith Winter / synthesizer

the album is based around some concept ian carr had of coming up with two themes in track one (hence elements I and II) and then sort of expounding on these themes throughout the album. from this angle, the album doesn't work so well since the first song mostly sounds like a bad synth experiment-like an outtake from a king crimson outtake. some peter sinfield stuff.... and i like synths.

but after this track, thing come together nicely. there are few solos for the amount of musicians appearing on the album-probably only two or three per tune. most disappointing, chris spedding does not get a solo. but all musicians contribute equally to the sound of the album (well there are a few nice instrumental digressions when a musician is truly featured-including a very nice feature for karl jenkins on oboe before "bedrock deadlock". wish the oboe was heard more often, but i always enjoy jenkins on this instrument-especially in soft machine).

chris spedding does play some of the cleanest guitar i have heard from him from his jazz-rock days. he employs a watery tone a lot which sounds great. his additions stand out almost most clearly in my mind of any of the musicians as far as his contributions.

actually tony roberts is probably the musician i was least familiar with on this album (only knowing him from a great Henry Lowther album, mainly) but he is great. especially his bass clarinet on "spirit level".

it is weird actually that roberts gets i think two solos and brian smith, who was carr's right hand man in nucleus, gets the same amount.

in fact i guess it is tough to see "solar plexus" as a nucleus album since it has so many guests and ian carr did in fact release his next album under "ian carr". but "solar plexus" was the last album with all these original nucleus guys (marshall and jenkins leaving for soft machine and spedding leaving to try to be a pop star).

i have mentioned this before, but i wonder what would have happened if john mclaughlin and chris spedding changed careers. i liked spedding's playing a lot more than mclaughlin's around this time and i wonder how things would have sounded if spedding had been the young british guitarist in miles band, not mclaughlin.

i will also mention in this long ramble that i generally enjoy keyboards a lot more than guitar and "solar plexus" is pretty weak in the keyboard department. jenkins doubles on a plinky hohner sounding e-piano (what was the deal with the whole hohner vs. rhodes thing? i guess rhodes was america and hohner was europe-the hohner sounds like a cheap toy generally compared to a rhodes, IMO. though a hohner clavinet is the greatest sound ever created). jenkins does comp a lot on the hohner, but recessed in the back of the mix. spedding is one guitarist, who, while he was on the scene, i could always enjoy. this definitely isn't the high point of his nucleus career, but as i said-his contributions are very interesting. i wonder if his wah and distortion pedals were broken or stolen or something....

[Alexander Hawkins]

Afraid I don't know this album, but there's a whole load of great players on it by the looks of things!

[mikeweil]

Sure I would like to comment on this, but I never got around to hear this one - Belladonna & Labyrinth were the only Nucleus albums I bought back then, and it seems I liked them, 'cause I still have 'em.

Ulrich Ohlshausen (one of Germany's leading jazz journalists) commented about the group that they performed that type of Bitches Brew fusion better than Miles himself at the time. They did a more controlled version of it, that was for sure. I like some passages on Belladonna quite a lot. The juxtaposition of Dave McRae and Gordon Beck on two different brands of electric pianos, in particular, yielded interesting results.

Edited March 6, 2006 by mikeweil

[Guest akanalog]

belladonna also has a young alan holdsworth on it!

yeah as i said, i initially thought to do "labyrinth", a main reason being i love the dueling electric pianos (one rhodes and one hohner). dave macrae is definitely an underrated e-piano technician. i am interested in hearing some Pacific Eardrum to hear what he did after nucleus.

belladonna seems sort of cold to me. i like it a lot, especially the second tune ("summer rain"). but i think maybe it is the drumming which makes the album overall sound a bit plodding and static compared to those before and after.

"solar plexus" is a lot more firmly in the jazz camp and in fact, i would hesitate to call it fusion at all. i do think from a jazz side, the playing and compostions are a bit stronger on "solar plexus".

[Guy Berger]

I will try to listen to this tonight. I remember thinking it was OK last time I listened to it, though it gets bonus points for not being run of the mill "fusion".

Guy

[Guest akanalog]

it's tough to really call it fusion at all. and it's definitely nucleus' least "fusion-ey" effort.

[Guest akanalog]

and i agree with you, guy, that i too found it "OK" when i listened to it at first and it was not until later i realized that the compositions had really stuck with me and it deserved more of my attention.

[mikeweil]

belladonna also has a young alan holdsworth on it!

yeah as i said, i initially thought to do "labyrinth", a main reason being i love the dueling electric pianos (one rhodes and one hohner). dave macrae is definitely an underrated e-piano technician. i am interested in hearing some Pacific Eardrum to hear what he did after nucleus.

belladonna seems sort of cold to me. i like it a lot, especially the second tune ("summer rain"). but i think maybe it is the drumming which makes the album overall sound a bit plodding and static compared to those before and after.

Belladonna was the very first time I ever heard Holdsworth! Still on the quest for his own sound and concept, but already a very interesting guitarist.

Yeah, Summer Rain is a very nice tune. I liked the rather cool quality of that album back then, and it still appeals to me. Clive Thacker played it rather cool, but I think it is a welcome change compared to the busy stylings of most other British drummers of the time, who always maneuvered on the verge of overplaying. I dug Thacker already with Brian Auger's Trinity, very clear and no-nonsense drumming.

Agree on McRae - he was one of the few to really explore the Fender Rhodes electric piano's sonic capacities with pedals and the like. No idea what became of him.

Just saw that Jon Hiseman produced Belladonna. Who produced Solar Plexus? Carr himself and Roger Wake?

Carr's composition sound a little too constructed to me - a lot of desktop composing, it seems. But sooo typical of the European jazz-rock of the time. Heavy Milesian influence on all parts.

[mikeweil]

Listening to Belladonna right now.

What makes Summer Rain so good is that fantastic solo Dave McRae plays until the end. One of the best Rhodes solos I ever heard - very nice, too, how Holdsworth engages in a bit of counterpoint dialogue at the beginning of the solo and then cuts out as McRae builds it up. Noone, not even Herbie Hancock, was milking the sonic possibilties of a Rhodes with pedals - fuzz and wah-wah I think - as much as McRae did in that solo. The one reason for me to keep this LP.

Too bad another dialogue of the two in Remadione which starts side B is faded out - hard to see why. - the album as a whole is so derivative of the Miles Davis LPs of the time - Mayday starts like an outtake from In A Silent Way!

Carr's composing reminds me a lot of the stuff he and others wrote for the United Jazz & Rock Ensemble - now that was a band that bored me all the time .....

[Guest akanalog]

mike, i am glad we are talking nucleus even if it isn't the AOW.

yes, that rhodes solo in "summer rain" is great. you might want to check out the nucleus album "roots"-the final track has a very nice rhodes feature for macrae. though as an album i suspect you will find "roots" to be unsatisfying. it even seems to be paying hommage to return to forever at points. i think it is a good one, though.

macrae went on to play in pacific eardrum which i guess was a new zealand? fusion band. that is where he was from, i think. and i believe he moved back there. brian smith, nucleus saxaphonist, was also i believe a new zealander though i might be wrong and he is australian.

something about "beladonna", though...the rhythms are too tight to be miles-ian. it's almost there but the groove never sounds easy enough. people always mention one of the songs on that album, "suspension", i think, as carr's best composition up to that point.

i actually see the miles influence in the first two nucleus discs most. especially the first one, "elastic rock", which has a nice stream of consciousness feel to it as the songs sort of flow into each other and are pretty short bursts of ideas.

i also agree about british drummers though as i mentioned in another thread i think all those british drummers were awesome! levin, webb, marshall, spring, etc....all those guys were great.

the united jazz and rock ensemble bored me too, from what i have heard.

[mikeweil]

i also agree about british drummers though as i mentioned in another thread i think all those british drummers were awesome! levin, webb, marshall, spring, etc....all those guys were great.

Well .... John Marshall: I found him insensitive. No subtlety. Soft Machine never had an appropriate drummer: Robert Wyatt's sensitivity and imagination with a more definite groove, that would have been great, but not John Marshall. Simply not my taste.

Of all British jazz rock drummers I liked Thacker the most. His groove with the Trinity was very tight.

Terry Cox did some nice work outside of the Pentangle back then, like on harold McNair's The Fence - great groove!

The others I don't know enough.

Sorry I can't discuss your choice .....

[Guest akanalog]

yeah i know what you mean about marshall, but they must have loved him over there!

he gets a track to himself for a drum solo on just about every thing i have heard him on-the last two soft machine live discs i heard he had a 10 minute drum solo on each disc!

that guy phil howard who was in soft machine for a second was pretty sweet...it is too bad he got fired so quickly.

marshall's solo feature on "solar plexus" is pretty short. just a minute or two at the end of "torso".

i think part of british drumming to me is sort of busy, well not overplaying, but as i think the penguin guide said of marshall "stiff virtuosity".

wyatt did indeed have a looser yet grooving approach, but i just don't care for the soft machine stuff w. elton dean.

[ep1str0phy]

spedding is one guitarist, who, while he was on the scene, i could always enjoy. this definitely isn't the high point of his nucleus career, but as i said-his contributions are very interesting. i wonder if his wah and distortion pedals were broken or stolen or something....

Although Spedding is certainly among my favorite guitarists in brit fusion, I find his more self-effacing work to be just as enjoyable as his "explode over the wall" episodes. He can be a terrifically nuanced session man--ala "Harmony Row" or "Songs for A Tailor"--without ever really stepping out... although that stuff is almost always gold (I'm a big fan of the Battered Ornaments albums). On John Marshall: a favorite of mine, especially w/Graham Collier and Jack Bruce--remarkably rhythmic, in the pocket where necessary. At the same time, I get this sense that the majority of these prog rock percussionists have a difficulty extending the beat; even with a guy like Jon Hiseman (who had a lot of the Elvin Jones stuff down pat), there's this pervasive sense of "metronome time." I guess "groovy" is the operational term, but it can be a drag sometimes.

[mikeweil]

yeah i know what you mean about marshall, but they must have loved him over there!

he gets a track to himself for a drum solo on just about every thing i have heard him on-the last two soft machine live discs i heard he had a 10 minute drum solo on each disc!

that guy phil howard who was in soft machine for a second was pretty sweet...it is too bad he got fired so quickly.

marshall's solo feature on "solar plexus" is pretty short. just a minute or two at the end of "torso".

i think part of british drumming to me is sort of busy, well not overplaying, but as i think the penguin guide said of marshall "stiff virtuosity".

wyatt did indeed have a looser yet grooving approach, but i just don't care for the soft machine stuff w. elton dean.

Yes they all loved Marshall - I once saw him live with Eberhard Weber's group. I guess they loved the energy and dedication he brought into every grouzp he played with - it was just his personal groove that never got me.

Phil Howard - IIRC he joined Soft Machine on Elton Dean's urging who wanted a more free form dummer. I saw them live on German tv back then - Howard was wild. I can see that Mike Ratledge probably wasn't feeling too comfortable with him. Ratledge, and later, too an excess, Karl Jenkins, were much more constructive - so it was only a matter of time before the free from leaning players were out.

Very interesting to compare the parallels and differences between various British jazz rock bands .....

[mikeweil]

..... On John Marshall: a favorite of mine, especially w/Graham Collier and Jack Bruce--remarkably rhythmic, in the pocket where necessary. At the same time, I get this sense that the majority of these prog rock percussionists have a difficulty extending the beat; even with a guy like Jon Hiseman (who had a lot of the Elvin Jones stuff down pat), there's this pervasive sense of "metronome time." I guess "groovy" is the operational term, but it can be a drag sometimes.

Hiseman - another Brit drummer I never liked. Very well described: an Elvin Jones type rock drummer, but too metronomic. Especially his post-Colosseum work is checked out to the extreme. I remember reading a Blindfold Test with Buddy Rich: they played Hiseman's solo on "Time Machine" and his comment was "He sounds like one falling down the stairs carrying tymps." I laughed my .... off.

Yeah, Jack Bruce's band was one where Marshall was right in the pocket!

[Guest akanalog]

http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/article.php?id=15163

this is john kelman at AAJ's summary of nucleus and their body of work. worth checking out if you want to learn more or get some other perspective.

[clifford_thornton]

Strangely, as I like some other British fusion of the time, I've never really checked out Nucleus. Looks like I now have some good places to start.

I don't remember much about hearing Jon Hiseman in Colosseum in terms of complaints, though I did like hearing his jazz work with Peter Lemer, and I guess he's on Things We Like, which I have yet to score a copy of. John Marshall is a lot to take, but overall his playing I enjoy even if it is a bit heavy-handed; Wyatt didn't really gel with the Dean-Ratledge group very well rhythmically (so I think), and I can't stand his singing so he's a bit out of the loop for me. Phil Howard is an interesting character; I felt on hearing his work with Dean and the Softs that he didn't have balance, but maybe that developed in other contexts.

[Guest akanalog]

i like hiseman on that early pete lemer ESP but colosseum were too bluesy for me to really enjoy.

i have some later colosseum stuff which is just sort of lame when they were incorporating moog-ey sounds and stuff but too guitar-wanky for me. not a big fan of "things we like". it's ok. no reason to really hear these guys play this kind of music. others can do it better. i would like to check out that dick heckstall-smith "story ended" album, though...

after some consideration i do not think "solar plexus" is in my top 5 nucleus albums.

i still like the compositions and the playing, bass and guitar especially, but it does sound stiff.

i think one thing that would have helped a great deal would have been to ditch the percussionist.

marshall is already busy and the added percussion just makes it too much of a muddle.

for anyone who doesn't know nucleus and wants to check them out i would recommend-

1."we'll talk about it later"

2."labyrinth"

3."beladonna"

4."roots"

5."elastic rock"

i do not think the cuneiform live disc is so good. sort of boring and stiff. i like the idea of ray russell being there but he doesn't help a whole lot. some of the songs are just not so interesting without the studio ability to multitrack. "in flagrante delicto", a later live one, is nice though....

[Guest akanalog]

maybe i should relisten to things we like.

[clifford_thornton]

some of the songs are just not so interesting without the studio ability to multitrack.

Sometimes I feel that way about the Softs, too.

Ray Russell is for me never a deterrent...

[Guest akanalog]

no russell is a positive. i just meant he can't really add anything to save the music...it's just sort of blah music.

i really like live soft machine post dean/wyatt. the live stuff with the six band is some of my favorite jazz fusionish stuff. and bundles era-ish stuff is good too besides the long-ass marshall drum solos.

i was just listening to some live dean and wyatt era softs (post dobson). i just really really dislike the combination of ratledge's abrasive organ tone and dean's abrasive saxello/sax tone. if it was the wyatt/hopper rhythm section with jenkins and ratledge-that would have been cool.

i only know phil howard from the first part of five and i just felt he had a more elvin jones-ish approach than john marshall and without him the compositions were pretty damn static and boring. five is about my favorite album cover so i wish i liked it, but it is dull to me.

[clifford_thornton]

Five is rad-looking (especially the embossed UK sleeve); I've always liked side two over side one as Marshall seems a bit stronger support.

Yeah, the abrasiveness of Dean and Ratledge on some of those live dates is pretty ear-splitting. Some of that had to do with experimental contact mikes Dean was using in the saxophone, which created a real tinny buzzing sound. Yuck.

And if Ray Russell can't add anything to the music, you're right, it must be inherently flawed. The records he cut for CBS, RCA and Intercord are all absolutely insane and wonderful. Not so sure about his later more sound-library affairs.

[ep1str0phy]

i like hiseman on that early pete lemer ESP but colosseum were too bluesy for me to really enjoy.

i have some later colosseum stuff which is just sort of lame when they were incorporating moog-ey sounds and stuff but too guitar-wanky for me. not a big fan of "things we like". it's ok. no reason to really hear these guys play this kind of music. others can do it better. i would like to check out that dick heckstall-smith "story ended" album, though...

I, too, am a fan of Hiseman's playing on the Lemer album (surprisingly flexible), but he plays far too metronome-groove on a lot of his stuff. I think it fit in pretty well with Colosseum, but only because that band could never be mistaken for 'jazz'--or even 'fusion'... they were as much an improv/blues-rock outfit as anything that came out of post-swinging 60's England, jazz chops be damned. Conversely, the rhythm section utterly confounds "Things We Like"--and, as a fan of both Jack Bruce and (in certain contexts) JH, it pains me to think that that combo couldn't carry off a frighteningly effective jazz-rock/free album... perhaps Heckstall-Smith and John McLaughlin are just a little too (timbrally, if not intellectually/spiritually) lightweight to 'compete' with an arena-ready drum/bass combo, but a little less metrogroove/rock intensity could've benefited the overall effect (I still enjoy a lot of it, though).