The blog you're reading right now wasn't meant to be "just" a place for obituaries. But lately, it seems, there have been too many deaths involving too many key figures in music -- both performers and those behind the scenes -- to ignore. Storm Thorgerson is among the great names in the music world. Again -- just like with the recent death of producer/engineer Andy Johns -- you might not know the name unless you're a die-hard audiophile who's spent a lot of time looking at album covers, checking out the credits, and you see certain names repeatedly.
Thorgerson -- a part of the graphic design studio Hipgnosis -- died Thursday at age 69 of complications from cancer. He had been battling health issues since suffering a stroke in 2003.
Thorgerson was a unique artist, which helped him to fit in well at Hipgnosis. Photographers (like me) have greatly appreciated his work through many years of looking at album covers and jackets. It didn't involve "typical" photography. It was work that you could sit in front of and examine for the entire time it would take to listen to the music that went along with it. It was mind-bending ... just like a lot of the music that went along with it.
Thorgerson and music. It was a perfect match.
Thorgerson himself said it best.
"I like photography because it is a reality medium, unlike drawing which
is unreal. I like to mess with reality ... to bend reality. Some of my
works beg the question of is it real or not?"
Now's a good time to remember just some of Thorgerson's art, and some of the music that went with it. What a legacy he's leaving behind. Wish he was here.
It's gonna be a night for partying, no doubt about that. It's not every day that you usher in a new year. We're not just talking nationwide here, we're talking a worldwide celebration.
Goodbye 2012! Hello 2013!
I'm content to bring in the new year in a relatively quiet way -- spent with family members at home eating chips and dip, maybe watching a movie or two, playing some games and listening to some music, tuning in to a rockin' New Year's Eve show on television as it gets closer to the stroke of midnight before giving my lovely wife the first kiss of a new year and hugging the kids.
That's how it'll be this year. But two of our kids are away from home this time, and our oldest is getting ready for a big life adventure of his own to start his year, living out a dream. It's going to be a very quiet, very simple New Year's celebration at home for us this year.
But I know exactly where there's going to be one whale of a party today. I know because I was at one just like it at this same time last year. It's not your typical New Year's Eve party. There's a birthday celebration that goes along with it. It's a birthday celebration for a musician, a "brother" of mine who has a whole lot of good musician friends to play with. It's filled with good food, good drinks, good friends, family, and plenty of good jamming.
My "brother" is a musician who appreciates a solid groove, whether it's soul or rock or blues or jazz or fusion or something even more progressive. It can be a groove that's funky, simple or more complex. But there's one thing that it has to be more than anything else: the groove has to be SOLID!
My "brother" and I have spent many hours listening to those grooves together, mostly in our younger years. That's how it was last year at this time too. While I was being lazy as I tried to kick a nasty cold, he was busy tooling around his house -- setting up microphone stands, mics, cables, guitar stands, guitars, a drum kit, amps, a laptop computer to record it all -- and the music we listened to back in our younger days was playing on the stereo while he was working away. It was music that brought smiles to our faces, even all these years later. Just like it used to be.
When his numerous other friends arrived for the party toward late afternoon and the live music started playing, it was good. It was very good. It lasted for hours, pretty much non-stop until the clock ticked midnight and 2012 arrived.
It was all about the groove. It will be that way again this time around, I'm sure.
It's late, almost bed time for me, and I haven't even put up a post in my music blog for today. Just for that, I'll dig up a CD review I did at the web site www.progressiveears.com almost 10 years ago, on a CD called "Unorthodox Behaviour" by the fusion band Brand X ...
*****
One look at many of Brand X's song titles should tell you that you're in for something very different: "A Duck Exploding," "Why Should I Lend You Mine (When You've Broken Yours Off Already)" easing into "... Maybe I'll Lend You Mine After All," etc. Look them all up and be entertained by the song titles themselves.
Was Brand X rock? No, but they certainly rocked. Were they fusion? I suppose if we HAD to put a label on them, that would be about as close as we could come to being accurate. I have a hard time comparing them to Return To Forever, Mahavishnu Orchestra or Weather Report myself, though there are occasionally faint nods toward those fusion supergroups (as in the jazzy sound of "Touch Wood" to close out this album with Jack Lancaster guesting in a brief sax accompaniment straight out of the Wayne Shorter School of quietly brilliant sax riffs).
This was 1976. This was Phil Collins stepping away from Genesis and its quest for a new lead singer for some outside "play time" and showing just how good he could really be on a drum kit and in other various forms of percussion (before Morris Pert joined to make it a quintet with "a vast number of bits and things that he hit while the tape was running, including: the Q.E. 2, Idi Amin, and undiscovered parts of Scotland") without vocals getting in the way. This was "Jammin' Phil," and he wailed. But it was much more than Phil Collins and the fame he was already gathering with Genesis.
This was Percy Jones stepping away from Brian Eno's music and putting in his own bid for "greatest bass player alive" status among the rest of the fusion bass giants of the day. This was John Goodsall stepping away from Atomic Rooster and session work and making a greater name for himself but still being a vastly underrated guitar player and composer who could easily trade licks with the best of 'em in both speed and style. This was Robin Lumley moving away from his role as live-concert pianist for David Bowie and the Spiders From Mars and vast amounts of session work and making a name for himself as a very tasteful keys player.
This was an immediately brilliant breakthrough for a new band. I'm not quite sure they've totally equaled it overall on one album since then, though they've come awfully close a few times through the years with follow-up works such as "Morrocan Roll" and (depending on who you talk to) "Do They Hurt?"
"Nuclear Burn" suits its title well. After nearly 6 1/2 minutes of ferocious drumming, you kind of want to tell Phil, "Hey, take a break, man, you've earned it!" The acoustic guitar work of Goodsall sets a nice tone for the laid back groove of "Euthanasia Waltz" before Lumley chimes in with a gorgeous solo of his own, and all the while Jones and Collins are laying down a perfectly entertaining rhythm. "Born Ugly," "Smacks of Euphoric Hysteria," pretty much all through this album ... it's all about laying down a very nice groove, expanding on it, allowing each other to go on timely riffs, and staying nailed-down tight throughout. There isn't a song on here that one might think lasted too long or not quite long enough. This is simply music that's sheer fun from first note to last (perfect music to drive to), and when you hear Phil in the middle of the title track shouting "Ha!" you can tell these guys are having tons of fun jamming to this stuff themselves.
In the Brand X catalog, this would become the album all others would be compared with. The bar was set high at the starting line. A unique achievement, but not surprising when you look at the players and all they'd already done before coming together to form that ultra-unique outfit known as Brand X.
Brand X would go on from Unorthodox Behaviour to expand, evolve, rotate, break up, get back together in a trio, move on ... probably the closest thing we have today to Brand X is the band Tunnels with Jones, MIDI vibe player Marc Wagnon, drummer extraordinaire Frank Katz, along with assorted appearances from Goodsall and Mark Feldman on violin. It's like they know how to breathe as one, everyone destined to play together in all their various forms. And, at their best, they're destined to leave listeners struggling to catch their breath.
I can say that my love of jazz fusion came later than my love of progressive rock, simply because I was introduced to the "more extreme" fusion later.
Oh, I'd thought I knew what fusion was about in my high school days when I started going ga-ga over girls, and I found myself going for the more romantic, smooth jazz sounds of musicians like Chuck Mangione and George Benson. I thought that kind of music would help me to get and hold on to a girl.
Then came my early college days, and I got a whole different kind of introduction to how intense jazz fusion can really be -- with its screaming rock-style guitar, rhythms more often associated with Latin sounds, keyboards riffing like crazy, and drummers pounding the snot out of those heads.
It meant discovering the guitar mastery of players like John McLaughlin, Al DiMeola, Steve Morse, and Allan Holdsworth; bass giants along the lines of Percy Jones, Stanley Clarke, and Jaco Pastorius; violin players as gifted as Jerry Goodman and Jean-Luc Ponty; keyboard wizards like Jan Hammer, Chick Corea, and T Lavitz; drummers like Phil Collins in his Brand X days and Billy Cobham with his powerful shoulders; and groups like Mahavishnu Orchestra, The Dixie Dregs, Weather Report, Return To Forever, and Brand X.
