Major Surgery: Baffling obscurity

Before British jazz-rock sank into lengthy repetition of the same, the most interesting music may have been that of Major Surgery. Prominent in my memory is a "Keep Music Live" event organised by the Glasgow Musicians Union one spring afternoon in a trade union social club just south of the river. The band played an exciting set and were happy to chat afterwards. 

Major Surgery returned to Glasgow in autumn 1975, performing at Partick Burgh Hall (the jazz venue of the time). After that, I lost track of them. Although they maintained a long residency at a Croydon pub (link) , they left only minimal recordings, making it difficult to check my memories.

But I recalled an earlier cassette-only release, "St Vitus Dance", on Gordon Beck's Jaguar Records label.  It is not listed on Discogs or any other platforms though. Re-finding my copy is an occasion. It is amazing how immediately familiar are the performances: that's one well-worn cassette. 

My original focus was on Jim Roche's guitar, from memory using an octave divider as well as the obvious wah-wah of the time. He was such an inventive guitarist, capably moving from supporting soundscapes to solo or duet playing in seconds. I maybe found Don Weller's sax too muscular? The sax I had heard at home stopped at Johnny Hodges; on my own records it started with rock session playing by Alan Skidmore; the bop and hard bop generations were still to be encountered. So I lacked context and was not really ready for Don Weller. 

Now, though, Weller and Roche sound well integrated, twisting and turning, propelled by the strong rhythm section. There is fine interplay here, sometimes quiet, sometimes tempestuous - such energy, far from the scale-running ditch into which jazz-fusion fell. 

Tracks such as "Jerkin the Gherkin" deliver a funky beat opportunity for each musician to solo, but are pretty much standard fare of the time. Others though, especially the title track, are spacious: eddying and flowing, allowing each musician the space to stretch out in passing combinations. Unison passages and jamming recall performances by the 1971 King Crimson, when the musicians learned to set aside their repertoire and trust their instincts, listen and create.

There is an  barely remarked historical moment in the early 1970s. If jazz musicians adopting jazz-rock could be accused by purists of chasing commercial success, it was not a move on which any prospered. In that, Major Surgery are emblematic but not unique. One of the most exciting bands of their time, but stuck playing in their local pub. Why was this? It may come back to my point above: a significant gap in the cultural familiarity rendered it unlikely that a jazz-rock fashioned from a post-Coltrane vocabulary could find a place.

So here I am, 50 years after last seeing Major Surgery and pretty much the same duration since losing interest in jazz-rock, retrieving that moment. How exciting and full of potential it felt.

Club and Company: Derek Bailey and Steve Lacy 1977

One lunchtime in late 1976, Derek Bailey and Steve Lacy performed a duet at the University of Strathclyde's Staff Club. That performance was the informal counterpart to their more "official" evening performance as Company at Glasgow Film Theatre.
Although the GFT hosted several performances around that time (others ranging from the recording of an album by avant-rock band Chou Pahrot to a performance by Howard Riley, Barry Guy and Tony Oxley), a cinema is uncongenial for music: the distancing of the audience necessary for cinema conspires against the intimacy needed for music. This was particularly so for Lacy and Bailey's saxophone and guitar duet.
The less formal pie-and-a-pint performance at the University Staff Club was much better in that respect. The day was bright for Glasgow, if cold, with light streaming into the club's bar space. Bailey and Lacy constructed their performance around a long exploration of one of Lacy's characteristic legato melodies, over Bailey's sustained harmonics. Pausing after half an hour or so, they then embarked on a couple of more agitated and open pieces, before Bailey played a short guitar solo piece.
Although Lacy could be heard in larger group settings, particularly in those cultivated with the long-term group at his jazz club in Paris, he thrived in the personal interplay of duo settings (thinking too of his duet with Mal Waldron, for example on Slam Records' "Lets Call This... Esteem") and these qualities could be felt in the very different setting of this lunchtime performance with Bailey.

Philadelphia-Copenhagen

Reviewing “The Black Ark” in an earlier post, I typecast Earl Cross as playing “post-bop” in a later trio performance, recalling a 1980 Third Eye Centre performance as having respected conventions. Recently revisiting that performance by “The Philadelphia Movement” (Cross, bassist Rashid Al Akbar and Jon Christensen substituting for intended drummer Muhammad Ali) shows the poverty of memory. 
This trio's music was some distance from a “post-bop” catch-all. Post-Coleman-Cherry open structures were underpinned by significant forward propulsion from Christensen (as ever), with a brightness under-served on the night by the PA coping poorly with Cross’s horns, especially when he moved from trumpet to flugel or French horns. 
The collective self-sustenance in this music, the continuing commitment despite the turning tide, are notable. A few years before this concert, Val Wilmer in “As serious as your life” placed a focus on those socio-economics, on these decisions, with Earl Cross as one of her examples. 
Now, it is a concert from another age – several twists and turns from the economics of music today. Non-star musicians taking such opportunities as were available to play, without a well-known back catalogue, without a merch stall. 
Cross, who died in 1987, remains barely a trace, Al Akbar not even that. Even in this age of aggregated digital documentation, Cross has only passing mention in Wikipedia, and a bare presence in Discogs and review sites for one album which documents another 1980 concert.

Roscoe Mitchell Sextet "Sound" 1966

“Sound” is one of those rare recordings that announces itself like Chtcheglov's “I come from the other land” - a self-contained, self-sustaining something else from somewhere else. Its audacity continues to astonish, even close to a half-century later. Audacity on the part of the creators – making something very distinct from even the cutting edge records of the time, audacity on the part of Delmark Records, who could not have listened to the sessions with a mindset of Return on Capital.

Even now, when the field that “Sound” set out has been plowed for many years, the challenge to norms of music-making are breathtaking. If one can hear fragments of Ornette Coleman (partly bidden by the explicit name-check), if one can hear fragments of the Albert Ayler group of 1965, it still remains out on its own. In a 1996 interview, Chuck Nessa, who recorded this and other important Chicago music, talked of self-reliance, and that shines through here.

“The Little Suite” shows a looseness that would not have been possible in jazz just a couple of years previously – and still wasn't. It also shows a group music coming together, in a way that would be continued the following year in “Old / Quartet” and evolve into the Art Ensemble of Chicago.

But it is the quality of silence that is most disturbing on the present album. Sun Ra had deployed silence-as-emptiness on “Heliocentic Worlds” the previous year, but in a programmatic way, within the context of an overall structure and forward impulse. In “Sound” what is deployed is not always silence as complete absence of sound, but silence as the loss, omission or destruction of forward rhythmic impulse. A decomposition into moments of indifference, where what – if anything – happens next involves decision / will and might as likely be nothing.

The wilfulness extends beyond that, particularly on “Sound” itself. If the main theme statement has some recognisable relationship to free jazz, the piece then moves into a feeling of radical challenge to pre-existing norms of musicality, a feeling that received wisdom of solo space and of thematic material are being conscious put in question and avoided.

Towards Philip Cohran

I have been intending to write next on Philip Cohran as a prime example of someone oriented towards a social function of music, based on listening to two 1968 LPs "On the beach" and "Malcolm X Memorial", as well as his music with Sun Ra. 
However today in the excellent Monorail Music in Glasgow I found a copy of "Kelan Philip Cohran and the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble". The article will need to wait...

Noah Howard “The Black Ark”

The records featured here to date have been at what might be the sedate end of expectations of 1960s free jazz – small groups working with free-flowing theme, quiet listening and interplay in developing, discarding the structural rigidities of hard bop. "The Black Ark" occupies another place, so let's go for that counter example.

Here the space is recognisably that created by the late Coltrane group: a “constituting power” which has become a “constituted power”. The muscular melodicism of Coltrane's 1966-7 performances – the lyricism that time forgot – is a clear influence both on Noah Howard himself and on the wider grouping. From the start, one can hear the “Meditations” format being embraced and extended.

“Domiabra” begins like one of those repetitive riff platforms that became common as the 1960s became the 1970s, but that begins to dispel as soon as the theme is stated. The three horns slurp at the phrases over a swirling sea of percussion. The often problematic Arthur Doyle is kept back – obviously not restrained, intensifying and thickening the sound, but contained in time and contribution. Trumpeter Earl Cross is someone I recall from a more restrained post-bop trio setting some 10 years after this recording; here he contributes powerful intensity. The busyness of the double percussion backwall and Sirone's fine prodding bass may conceal the extent of the traditional structure here, the essential sequentiality that allots each their solo space.

"Mount Fuji" has particularly pronounced Coltrane influence, much of the time close to being a version of Coltrane's “The Father, Son and Holy Ghost”.

In recent years, “The Black Ark” has risen well beyond its original reception and come to be seen as a free jazz classic, a landmark album. And yet, landmark of what? What is to be said of the “Mount Fuji” - “Queen Anne” side effectively being a replay of the first side of “Meditations”? Is that a bad thing, denoting some lack of novelty? Perhaps it is simply the sign of a community who had grasped it as the basis material for a shared music.

Another view: Free the Music 

 

Turning point 1964

Paul Bley's Improvising Artists Inc. glowed briefly in the mid 1970s, retrieving remarkable past moments from his own repertoire (the Hillcrest Club group with Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry) and providing a platform for new recordings in unexpected settings (the Sun Ra solo sessions).

“Turning point” contained particularly interesting material, in the form of five pieces recorded in March 1964 by his group with Gary Peacock and Paul Motian along with John Gilmore, then performing for a brief and rare period in settings outside the Sun Ra Arkestra.

Carla Bley composed all but one of the compositions on the session. The most interesting performance though is probably that of Paul Bley's own “Turning”. It encapsulates the dynamic flow between the group members and the individual spaces that open up. Gilmore takes some space akin to his solo on Sun Ra's “Rocket Number Nine”, finding his way to a conclusion pushed by the other three musicians.

“Ictus”, a composition familiar from Bley's then recent recordings with Jimmy Giuffre, is taken at an extremely fast pace. It sounds like Bley has ingested the theme into automatic mode, and Gilmore makes no attempt to state the theme. This makes the overall performance more interesting, as Gilmore's performance over a blur of impressions of the thematic material forces him to take his commentary to new places.

The session concludes with “Ida Lupino”, a melodic, rhythmic, almost Latin feel, with an elegant conclusion from Gilmore.

Bley would record another album predominantly of Carla Bley compositions a few months later with another musician from the Sun Ra Arkestra in a very different group, with a very different sound envelope. In this respect “Turning point” perhaps does represent just that, a pointer on the way to the “Barrage” quintet.