Brian Auger's Oblivion Express
Oblivion Express

THE REVIEW

A musician of astronomical skill, a decisive innovator in the sixties for the pioneering fusion of jazz culture with the epidermic nature of pop and rock, the London-born organist and pianist Brian Auger has been a great point of reference for many even in the seventies. He then gracefully accepted fading into the background, like a serene person with a heart of gold, while many other keyboardists, not even worthy of tying his shoes, were elevated to phenomenons by industry insiders and the collective imagination.

It is still not difficult today to see him play, at seventy years old, in our parts (which I highly recommend to anyone): he has a Sardinian wife, Italy has always been his second home, he decently mumbles our language and his still-intact desire to play makes him eagerly accept the modest gigs that small live music venues around here can offer. There's been circulating, for a couple of years, a DVD of a rather recent concert of his at the Baked Potato (a renowned jazz "hole" in Los Angeles) with the current quartet Oblivion Express, including his two children, the beautiful Savannah on vocals and the precise Karma on drums, so the only one not bearing the Auger surname is the bassist. The stage is a simple platform where the four musicians barely fit, and Brian's spot is placed half a meter from the first tables occupied by the venue's patrons, who go into raptures whenever he makes the Hammond sing and roar like no one else.

This album from 1971 captures him at a career turning point: he has just assembled a new formation, and this signature, Oblivion Express, would become the definitive name for his musical life, being the titleholder of a dozen records. Auger temporarily also takes on the task of lead vocals, since July Driscoll, a major vocal protagonist of his former sixties bands Steampacket and Trinity, had departed some time ago. A real shame, because July's powerful and expressive soulful voice provided the necessary added values of accessibility and spectacle to Brian's virtuosic music, but she had by then opted for the abstruse and asymmetric experimentalism of another musician, her boyfriend and later husband Keith Tippett, abandoning our round British blues filled with jazz. Amen.

Auger's voice is certainly nothing special, a bit hoarse and lacking, although gritty and likeable. Instrumentally, however, we are well-off, in this first incarnation of Oblivion Express the work of drummer Robbie McIntosh stands out, a young but already savvy Scottish musician, who would later further distinguish himself a few years later with the Average White Band before sadly and prematurely succumbing to a classic overdose. On bass, there's another excellent musician, the powerful and intense Barry Dean. On guitar, Brian makes a not too happy choice, the lanky and genuinely unremarkable Jim Mullen, whose main peculiarity lies in plucking the strings of the electric directly with his fingers, without using a pick. The album is one of those recorded over a few nights in the studio, as was done in the past: the "live" feeling of the performances is palpable, certainly less precise but much warmer than the layered multitrack productions that would soon take hold.

Brian chooses to open with two instrumental covers: he first pays homage to his friend and former Trinity companion John McLaughlin, reinterpreting the melodramatic "Dragon Song", released only a few months earlier on the album "Devotion" by the not yet famous guitarist. The stern and dark riff with a very progressive flavor that characterizes the piece provides an opportunity, with its suspended and lengthened notes, to greatly highlight McIntosh's fluid percussive work.

"Total Eclipse" follows, credited to an unknown composer named Ball, and is stretched beyond eleven minutes by a psychedelic jam session, with the leader's piano and then organ caught in liquid and mystical arabesques.

In the remaining tracks, all of his own composition, Brian experiments with his vocal abilities and above all his vision of the then-emerging jazz rock, or fusion as one might call it, made in his case of robust rock-blues riffs in unison between bass and guitar, providing strong rhythmic drive, with the firm yet agile jazz undertone of the drums behind them, and finally at the very forefront his brilliant jazzistic vein, on the piano and especially on the organ, supported by perfect technique but also by proverbial intensity and emotion. Under Auger's fingers, the Hammond, this mythical instrument conceived to accompany religious services and instead so well adapted to rock music, barks and bites, describes and accents, dazes and enchants, with a timeless quality capable of binding the enthusiast to those flourishing years of music more than ever, experienced by the then-blond virtuoso of ivory keys as an absolute protagonist.