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Rating: Hello everyone. This is my first sixteenth review, I hope that among those who read it there will be someone who can be understanding, maybe they'll want to teach me how to do it. It's not something that comes easily to me, and this difficulty hasn't allowed me to make this my first sixteenth review a review comprehensive of all essential information. Missing are four introductory lines about the jazz musician Paul Bley, the most important figure in the making of this record. I don't know much, what I know is that the band that produced the music for these recordings was under his name, it was his record label that published the album (Improvising Artists), the pieces that compose it are his and belong to a couple of important female jazz musicians who succeeded in the role of his wife, his are the notes of keyboards inside.
And there is also a lack of supportive information for an idea I've formed while reading about the experimental journey with synthesizers that Paul Bley embarked on in the '60s. Well, this album would take its place as a piece in such a journey considering the entirely electronic instrumentation with which it was made, but I can't say if it was actually part of that project.
At this point, I say Space Jazz for reasons that will be clear in the end.
To be honest, I didn't even succeed in making this review my first sixteenth review. Maybe it could manage to be the first second sixteenth review I publish, maybe the first thirty-second, I'd have to check … maybe the first on Pastorius, … no, not even that, if I think about it, I've talked about him before. It’s complicated to get ahead of oneself!
Maybe I'll say something correct if I say that this is the first review on this site on the early career recordings of Jaco Pastorius and Pat Metheny. From what I’ve read about the album, it seems that's what it's about. The two met, just over twenty, just a year before ending up playing in Paul Bley's band. Pastorius's bass sound is already unmistakable, that of Metheny's guitar, from the little, very little I've heard, I’d say no, and in the end, it’s not even a bad thing.
The greeting, at least that, was sincere. I do it from the rings of Saturn where my eardrums were sent with me attacked by the music contained in this album. The objects that form the rings, which usually like to present themselves in the form of rocky bodies, for once choose the guise of notes, and they don't choose badly because they are those of Pastorius's bass. My feeling is to fly through them dodging them at times slowly, at others at a very high speed, with sudden accelerations. The interventions of Metheny and Bley are sometimes stars glimpsed for a moment between one object and another, sometimes rays of light running in the same direction as the listener also dodging the rocky bodies, sometimes mists of light of different colors. To keep the course is Bruce Ditmas's drums. The essence of the record consists of four long improvisations on guiding themes. I highlight the melodic developments of Bley’s electric piano in Vashkar, the sidereal walking bass of Donkey, the supersonic clusters of notes, the variations and Metenhy's almost rock 70 distorted guitar in Vampira, and Pastorius's bass in Batterie. The rest are brief fragments.
I try one last definition: this is the first review on the deb in which the term "Space Jazz" is used. A bit difficult for it to be truly so, I'm not even sure Space Jazz exists. In that case, though, it would be a good thing to invent it. It’s likely that the more correct term to use in this case is Free Jazz and maybe it’s just me that this music fills my head with all this cosmic-ness. It might also be that in the end, this review proves to be nothing other than the first in which such an improbable definition is ventured for some music. Cerea fanciot.
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