Soft Machine
Bundles

THE REVIEW

The eighth studio effort by Soft Machine, released in 1975, stands out for its uniqueness within the already diverse musical journey of the band. This quality is due to the una tantum integration into the lineup of a musician who was truly off the charts in terms of artistic value—a guitarist blessed with unique and unrepeatable talents.

The band’s jazz rock, which had taken on more or less experimental shades from the fourth to the seventh album after their “Canterbury sound” beginnings, and to be fair was much more jazz than rock, here takes a sharp turn toward a kind of fusion reminiscent of entities such as John McLaughlin’s Mahavishnu Orchestra and the young Chick Corea’s Return to Forever. The musical offering becomes suddenly less cerebral and more fast-paced, virtuosic, and electrifying.

Then this superstar guitarist arrives and changes everything—the other four step back and give him center stage, entranced by his supreme phrasing ability and incisiveness. Wind player Carl Jenkins composes at the piano, and that’s the instrument he commits to playing full-time, almost erasing soprano sax and oboe from the mix and thereby taking space away from the other keyboardist Mike Ratledge (more skilled than Jenkins and a historic founding member, but currently somewhat sidelined), who thus retreats to the minimoog synthesizer.

This was the incarnation of Soft Machine that I had the pleasure of seeing in concert no less than three times, as they frequently toured Italy in those years. Throughout the shows, the two pianists—one on each side of the stage—pressed the black and white keys, weaving carpets of harmonies and chords, while the drummer and bassist pulsed out the rhythm, lively and precise. And so, center stage, he stood—with his pageboy haircut, long face, and hands enormous and slender beyond description—on that fabulous white Gibson SG with three pickups, unleashing torrents of notes on abstruse scales, spanning even two octaves, covering half the fretboard without having to glide his palm, so long and agile were his fingers.

An absolute spectacle: it was impossible to keep up rationally with what he was doing; the speed in certain passages and the constant thematic freedom of his phrasing were unattainable—a veritable avalanche of notes would overwhelm the brains of the audience, and the only thing left to do was to let go and be swept away by his spontaneity, unpredictability, and the dynamism of his guitar lines. In short, as this studio album also demonstrates, the newcomer had swiftly demoted Soft Machine to the role of backing band for his musings up and down the fretboard, with his bandmates perfectly happy and accommodating, content to continue on ad libitum in this arrangement.

Except… nothing of the sort happened. Mr. Allan Holdsworth, right after the recording of this album, told them: “You know what? I'm off to play with Tony Williams’s band, the drummer of my dreams—I've waited my whole life for this!” The blow was almost fatal; from that moment on, Soft Machine could no longer do without a guitarist among their ranks, recruiting a couple of quite accomplished ones, but, unfortunately for them, none as irresistible as Allan.

Soft Machine still exists—although ignored by most. They reunited about ten years ago, after a hiatus of over thirty years. Personally, as I’m not very inclined toward the (almost) cerebral and experimental jazz of their pre-Holdsworth period, nor at all toward the psychedelic, hippie ramblings of their earliest “Canterbury” phase (the one with Kevin Ayers and the young Robert Wyatt still able to play drums), I find this album the most interesting in their substantial—but not vast—discography (13 releases). Thanks above all to Allan, one of my guitar heroes, who, on these tracks, moves like a train.