Jasun Martz
The Pillory

LA RECENSIONE

That Jasum Martz was the sound engineer for Frank Zappa and the keyboardist for Michael Jackson, matters little. Perhaps nothing at all. A genius is a genius regardless of who they have worked with. In his personal profile on the website, he is listed as a painter, sculptor, musician, composer, an all-around artist, in short. In 1978, after the Zappa experience, he decided to produce his own music. A lot of material was already in the works since 1976 but when it came time to record, everything revolutionized in his mind, and he flew to London to hire the Neoteric Orchestra: he needed a 40-piece orchestra to counterbalance his obsessive, egocentric, and onanistic musical concept that often involved: Him and his mellotron. When Martz presented the scores to the orchestras, they thought him a madman, or perhaps someone playing Stravinsky's wannabe.

Yet, the result amazed everyone, both for the structure of the work itself, consisting of a single piece, "The Pillory," of nearly 45 minutes, and for the musical content, fiercely avant-garde, experimental, and possessing extraordinary evocative power.

There was no Zappa in the work, except in small details dictated by the teaching in orchestral use; it was essentially music in splendid and radical progression. The idea of combining large doses of mellotron with choirs and the orchestra was the winning one: the generated anomaly resulted in a disorienting freshness and the interrupted symphonic apotheosis, now by Eddie Jobson's violin, now by chilling choirs, now by the insane percussion of Ruth Underwood and Paul Whitehead, seemed endless. The tortuous paths of the electronic keyboards were able to highlight his musical disease well, sometimes reminiscent of the unprecedented Floydian improvisations of the suite "Atom Heart Mother" and incorporating the orchestral experimentations of the great composers of the twentieth century.

In the more recent CD version, a long suite has been included as a bonus track. The piece "In Light In Dark In Between" is from a few years later and is also of great and compelling compositional beauty. The piece revolves around an imaginative orchestral score with clarinet and violin as protagonists, and where the piano counterpoints with notes of rare wisdom, creating a sort of very personal and peculiar chamber music.

After the first enthusiastic reviews, at the time, Martz said that people, listening to "The Pillory" were either positively or negatively affected, but no one was the same as before. This change that the author finds generated in the listener is a starting point, demonstrating once again the strength of music, of the very idea, of how the musical concept can be determinant, if it obviously comes from the mind of a genius.

Sioulette