Patto
Hanging Rope

Being one of my favorite bands, I have never let anything slip through my fingers from this quartet, including this release in the form of a double LP or single CD that appeared in 2015. I must point out that the amazing jazz/blues/rock formation in question left us only three official albums, one each year from 1970 to 1972, plus a fourth work that was rejected by the record label at the time in 1973, and was finally released posthumously in 1995.

Of the 15 songs present, only a few are unreleased, at the time rejected recordings from their albums. Most of the tracks are recovered from the mythical “BBC Sessions” that raged beyond the English Channel in the sixties and seventies and included almost all the musical realities riding the wave. It was a strange hybrid between Live and Studio Sessions. The artists played live, in front of a limited audience of attendees, in a theater/studio equipped to the brim, and were therefore captured with extreme quality by microphones and machinery controlled by the experienced technical staff under the employment of the British State Broadcaster. Thereafter, if necessary, integration with studio recordings of the live performances was provided, adding or correcting instrumental and vocal sections. Over time, these recordings have emerged one by one from the BBC archives, constituting hundreds of posthumous works, real gems for enthusiasts.

What to say about Patto… the perfection in terms of a cohesive, original, creative, ironic to the farcical, brilliant, even virtuosic group (the guitar, massively so!) and tough (the drums, rock-solid like few others). A true sponge soaked in rhythm & blues, jazz, rock, Zappa, Beatles, hard, be-bop, blues, funky, to be squeezed with joy and forever. Listening to these “studio concerts” from 1971, I find myself noting how much jazz there was at the start of the group's career, how many improvisations, how much use of the vibraphone struck by the skilled mallets of Ollie Halsall, later gradually abandoned to dedicate himself to the piano and especially guitar. And what a superb singer Mike Patto was, the right rock voice perfectly connected to jazz and blues, ironic and communicative, powerful and wide-ranging, tender and angry, naive and amiable.

But Ollie Halsall? A genius, a luminous top-notch talent, thunderous but astronomically underrated and unlucky, he who not even forty years old found nothing better than to exile himself to the island of Mallorca, making a living from small jobs and gigs for Spanish rock and pop groups, including Beatles cover bands, or keeping up with the activity of his friend Kevin Ayers, the only one who paid him attention: unheard of, unjust, unbelievable, inadmissible, grotesque, absurd, irritating, painful.

Do two things if you can/want. The first is demanding: if you happen to be on vacation or for any other reason in Mallorca, take the climb from the seafront to the village of Dejà, near the northwestern coast. In its cemetery, placed to have a view over the Mediterranean, there is the tomb of this lesser god of rock. It is distinguished because the small headstone has two electric guitar knobs screwed into the marble!

The second thing is to go listen to “Dance to My Tune” by Tempest, the band Halsall joined after the end of Patto, which also criminally lasted too little due to insufficient success. The track is a brisk and noisy rock blues, normal, nothing special, but at the third minute everything calms down and Halsall's solo begins, building up over the splendid work of the rhythm section (Jon Hiseman on drums, another lesser god), with the infinite naturalness of a jam session among skilled people, truly skilled, and with their hearts in the right place. It lasts almost three minutes and is simply the best guitar solo that I know. And I know thousands.