Oax Pick - Tarfala Trio - Syzygy

Tarfala Trio - Syzygy (NoBusiness Records 2011, 2 x LP + SingleSided 7")

Anyone who didn't think you needed some great music the days between Christmas and New Year? If so, you're wrong, very, very much wrong.
Here's a mighty majestic 2LP + ½ 7" album by Tarfala Trio - some of the best improvised trio music you can get these days.
Mats Gustafsson blows his horns, Barry Guy speak to his bass like he (or it?) was God and Raymond Strid, ahh, Raymond Strid, what a percussive master he is - whatever he can't do with percussion has not to be done at all.
Four side-long tracks (+ the single-sided 7"), recorded live in Belgium and released in a most beautiful package, including a 12" photo-book, by the high quality Lithuania label NoBusiness Records.
Yet another day has been aurally saved.
O'

Oax Pick - Tony Williams Lifetime

Emergency! - 2 LP (1969)

(turn it over) - LP (1970)

This is SO powerful. The perfect power trio of Tony Williams on furious drumming and whispering vocals, John McLaughlin on demon guitar and Larry Young on wild organ (love his science fictional chords like from outer space), including the bass pedals. On (turn it over) mighty Jack Bruce is added on bass.
The music is expressive in more than one way and often finds it climax when all of them 3/4 climbs the peak of madness. Pure music! Gee fer it!

O'

Just An Important Album Pt 9

Well, what to say about these groundbreaking albums?
Avant freeform pop with punk attitude long before punk was invented.
Otherwise it's very well played, very well composed and arranged and very well sung.
Pure joy.
Trout Mask Replica was released in 1969. Produced by Zappa.
Lick My decals Off, Baby was released the year after, 1970.
TMR is considered being a true classic - and I can't nothing but agrtee, but like many others I think maybe that LMDOB are superior to it.
TMR are always re-issued as CD whenever needed and very easy to find. LMDOB was released on CD in 1989 and have been out of print for almost 20 years - unbelievable. But, there's a new re-issue on vinyl, so go find the old grammophone again!
O'

Just An Important Album Pt 8

Another triplet of must-have albums of undescribeable aural experiences:

In Search Of Space


Doremi Fasol Latodo


Space Ritual


In spring 1973 Yan and I for the first time did act as DJs on a big school disco at our own school. Some people knowing our musical taste were suspicious, but the arrangers of the disco only knew us as kind and easygoing guys and had no idea to what we use to listen to at home. They probably thought it was the chirpy-chirpy-cheep-cheep stuff that was going around at the radio of the time.
After some heavy openers with tracks from Iggy & The Stooges Raw Power we turned on 'You Shouldn't Do That' from In Search Of Space on the highest volume and left the DJ stand, went dancing with some inncoent girls. Soon we were the only ones dancing....

This was the beginning and the end of our very short career as DJs.
On the other hand it our love affair with the early Hawkwind stuff recently had begun...

O'

Just An Important Album Pt 7

Silver Apples - Silver Apples (1968)

Silver Apples - Contact (1969)

Two guys from New York City, Simeon Coxe III (Simeon), on oscillators and primitive synthesizer of own homemade origns and/or constructions, and Danny Taylor on drums and percussions. Stanley Warren was a guy who wrote the words to most of the songs
Modern, original, almost a decade before Alan Vega & Suicide's attempts. Melodic mantras and pulsating beats we recognised on the dancefloors in the late 90s.
And on and on...
These two records are magnificent and good, pointing forward in a most unusual way. And we're still talking about the 60s...
An important album? Well, actually it wasn't for me. I've recently heard them, but them almost chocked me and made me think how come this little combo became cult and not on top of the bills of cred?
I don't have any answers... Sometimes things just happens.
Anyway.. lend them a few ears or so...
In 1970 a third album was recorded, Garden, but as their label Kapp Records, was bought by MCA and the album was lost and forgotten until 1996 when it was released.
O'

Just An Important Album Pt 6

On this very typical March day, while eating my breakfast, while watching through the kitchen window how the snowmixed rain is pouring down outside, I chose to put on some Brian Eno records on the player.
And how much I realized the importance of 'Another Green World' and 'Before And After Science', their wonderful mix of strong melodies, gentle ambiences, well sung and played, this none-musicain Brian Eno has a wonderful, gentle voice - I love escpecially when he uses it for the harmonies - and he's also a magnificant player, no matter what he say himself. Both records have great production by Eno and Rhett Davies.
Even though there was a two year span between them, for me they have always been connected, almost as if they were a double set, and very often when I play one of them I also paly the other one. 81 minutes of genius.
O'

Just An Important Album Pt 5

When sitting here listening to Aphex Twin's great "Selected Ambient Works 85-92" I realise how many of all those ambient/techno/etc records that probably never would have been made if it wasn't for the ancestors. Fripp & Eno and those, of course, all the way back to Satie and others.
But, on machines, I cannot think of anyone more important for me as a listener than the old guys in Tangerine Dream whos records until mid-70s were magnificent.
In 1974 I bought "Phaedra", really a landmark for me as an appreciater of ambient sounds with discreet rhythms here and there. It was spellbinding. Long, silent pieces of sounds and music, low volume, but so full of inspirational stuff. Sometimes when things get quiet you're forced to concentrate on what you hear and the audio experience gets even bigger than if it would have been loud as hell.
A while after that I bought the 2 LP set "Zeit", a none-rhythmic ambient masterpiece with for side-long tracks. It was like entering into surreal none-existing landscapes. You could hear it, but was it there?
O'

Just An Important Album Pt 4

Well, what about this?
There is something to tell.
Yesterday, on the first day of The New Year I had to work, I was on duty (and still is). The alternative everyday "have-to-earn-some-money" life job.
The situation made me go by car for about 200 kilometers to another hospital in the region, do the job I had to do and then go back the 200 kilometers again.
A lot of time in the car driving through winter landscapes.
And as always during these situations I was loaded with music I brought with me.
It use to be Joxfield (of course), otherwise Hawkwind or some other nice stuff. This time 'the other stuff' was Chicags III, originally a double LP (now a single CD) from 1971.
And while listening to it, especially the first four tracks of what was the first LP side, my mind started spinning and I realise that once this was a very important band in my develpoment as a music lover and listener.

In spring 1970, as a fifteen years old youngster, at a disco at school the DJ played a terrific version of a cover of Specer Davis Group's I'm A Man. What was that? It was a single and in the middle of the long song the DJ had to turn from side A to side B to continue. I had to ask. What was it? Chicago Transit Authority, he said.
A couple of days later I tried to find it in the record store. No success. It was out of stock, but there was an alternative version, a radio edited one, shorter. I bought it. It was still very good, but not the same as the extended, long LP version.
And it had some strange track with horn arrangemants on the B-side.
I went looking for the LP. Also out of stock! But, there was a new one out, they said, Chicago's second release. The groupname was changed just to Chicago to avoid some problems with the Chicago Transit Authority transport company. The 2nd release was called just Chicago, even though it immediately became knowns as Chicago II. Another double LP set. I bought it unheard and went home, ready for some raving rock n roll listening, and put it on:
'What the heck!'. A record filled with horns and jazz and stuff, not what I expected. Not what I use to like. Anyway, through the listening I realised there were some really good moments and as I continously listed to it more and more I also started liking it more and more.
My ears was opened up for brass arrangements, jazz solos and stuff. This was good - really good, and I still consider this particular recprd being one of the Top 100 Albums of all time.
Soon I laid my hands on their first, Chicago Transit Authority, a lot of jazz, but also a lot of Terry Kath, one of my favourite guitar players, a sadly underrated one, maybe because of his too early death.
In spring 1971 I bought Chicago III (their third double LP in a row). Still a very good record, but there was some weak moments, some fillers.
My Christmas gift # 1 for 1971 was their fourth release, Chicago IV - Live At Carnegie Hall, for the first time not a double LP release. It was a quadrouple. Four LPs in a huge box filled with pictures, books and stuff. Live recordings of most of their stuff, a lot of close-to-the-originals versions, but also tracks really extended, especially the ones where Terry Kath spread out his guitar wings.
I loved it!

And it was yesterday, when I drove through the winter landscapes, listening to Chicago III, I realised it was 37 years ago since I spend the Christmas with their live record. 37 years! Oh Mah God! And yes, it's a cliché, but it's really like it was yesterday. I don't even have to close my eyes to feel exactly how it felt while sitting there in my room with the stereo on, playing it again and again....

Summer 1972 they release V, a single LP. Short tracks. Nice radiofriendly pop music, a step in a new (well, new and new, let's say: another) direction. A couple of tracks was ok, I bought it, but soon I stoped playing it. It was actually a bit boring. And after that Chicago went into The Land of AOR and I definitely lost interest.

But, looking at history, between april 1969 and october 1971 they released four excellent albums, all important to me, albums I still come back to every now and then and listen to, expecially Chicago II, their true masterpiece.
Just go for them!

O'

Just An Important Album Pt 3

Sitting here at home this early sunday evening listening to some early seventies bootlegs with Miles Davis.
Not only that it's winter solstice today, also the music makes my mind goes spinning and remembering.

In 1973 both Yan and I went to gymnasium, as well as our close friend TC3, the vivid caterer. On saturday mornings we tried to earn some extra money by working as mail-men substitutes, carrying out letters to different parts of our city.
Yan and I were working in the central parts, TC3 in the northern, where we all also lived. At the same place TC3 worked was another substitute, let's call him Hoffe. He was 4 - 5 years older than us and had some very interesting records we could borrow and some of them bacame some of the most influential in our lives as listeners.
One of these records was 'Miles Davis at Fillmore: Live at the Fillmore East', recorded june 17 - 20 1970 and released the same year as a double LP set, with sidelong edited versions of each nights concert and titled Wednesday Miles, Thursday Miles, Friday Miles and Saturday Miles, all in the already classic Miles "I don't care a shit what the fuck you call the tracks" Davis manner.
Sometimes in may or june 1973 we borrowed it from Hoffe and put it on the grammophone and thought it was terrible. Just chaotic noise and irregular sounds, none of which we liked. It was put aside.
A few weeks later we all were at a heavy party (and let's leave all told memories from THAT to another biography) up the coast. They day after both Yan and me and an undescrible hangover and was sure we both should if not die at least not survive (?!?!). We needed a rest (all the others from that party went out fishing with someone's fishingboat).

We went back to my parents place, where I lived.
The regular behaviour was always to put on some music when at home, but this time I just couldn't find anything suitable to put on as a soundtrack to our poor souls.
What's suitable to chaos? (This was before Merzbow and the other noise-artists)
Then I saw the Miles at Fillmore record and putted it on and laid down on one of the two sofas not already occupied by Yan.
And Miles and Jack DeJohnette and Dave Holland and Steve Grossman and Airto Moreira just turned our minds on and both Yan and me look at each other from our opposite sides of the room with big eyes and in between the terrible headache we both shouted out: This isn't bad at all! This is exactly how we feel! This is real soul music!
Then we probably both fell asleep and I remember myself just getting up to change LP sides over and over again.
This was an important moment in our lives when we converted from Don't Like It to Like It A Lot. Our minds became opened up.
From this point there wasn't almost any music we couldn't stand any longer because it was too demanding.
A couple of weeks later I bought Miles' 'Live/Evil' which I think is a better record, but the Fillmore one was the Important one.

Hoffe? Two and a half years later I moved to my first own apartment in some rough house half the way to the central part of the city. It was my brothers OneRoomPlusKitchen. He and his then girlfriend, now wife, just moved two gateways to a bigger apartment. Their closest nighbour was Hoffe. I didn't see him much, just met him a couple of times in the foodstore and was impressed when he sometimes whistled some Charlie Parker solo note by note. He was a jazzman.

Now on the stereo is a Miles' boot from 1973 with Mike 'Finger' Henderson on bass and Al Foster on drums, two other of my Miles' idols. But that's another story.

O'

Just An Important Album Pt 2

I was a late starter. My first listening to Family was about 1975 when their history had ended. I heard Bandstand, fell in love with it, then I heard Family Entertainment and even though there was one or two weak moments the highlights was of outstanding quality. I realised this was a band for me. The following years I bought the rest of their stuff and really liked most of it with the only exception of It's Only A Movie, their last release. Every now and then I return to their music and think it's still great. Some of it has been a bit dated, but most of it is still really strong.

Chapman & Whitney started their new band Streetwalkers and they made three studio and one live albums, most of them really good. In 1976 Yan, TC3 and me were fortunate to watch them live at The Roundhouse in London. Red Card was newly released and the concert was powerful, Chapman turned his lungs inside out and the wood splinter from the tambourines poured all over us all the time.

Sometimes in the late 70s I also laid my hands on the album Chapman-Whitney made between Family and Streetwalkers, the one confusingly titled (Chapman-Whitney) Streetwalkers.... well, watch the picture and you see which one I mean.

Released in 1974 on Reprise Records (K54017) as an LP and unbelivebly never re-released on CD, a real mystery.
The music captures some of the best moments ever heard from these guys. The musicians are those normally found in the Anyway/Bandstand Family era or King Crimson of 1971-72. Mel Collins' playing is superior, no matter if it's rough sax on the masterful and funky Call Ya, when he and John Wetton build the track towards the end in a way that makes us wonder when the rocket finally will leave while Chapmans voice moves like a wild and hungry animal in a cave, or when he plays his own wonderful and beautiful clarinets arrangement in Sue And Betty Jean, the slow ballad which early Genesis would have offered one arm or two to have written.
The final three-track-suite Just Four Men/Tokyo Rose/Hangman complete this great album when it goes from soft spoken poetry in the beginning to rough and dirty proggrock in the end, with Whitney's chords fighting against Del Newmans' great strings arrangements.
An highly appreciated album. Go for it!
O'

Just An Important Album Pt 1

Oooops!
Just trying to find out weather I can import a picture from elsewhere or not.
Seems like I succeded.
And don't try to make me explain why I took this particulary album cover.
Or, why not....
Soft Machine's 'Third' is actually one of the most important records in the ears of the Joxfield ProjeX beholders (earholders?).
We both stood there in the record store in 1970 or 1971 and started listening to the first, side-long track, Facelift, and thought it was terrible. Just irregular noise.
A year later we heard it again, but this time it was just a smash hit right into our heads, hearts and stomach. We were ready for it and loved it and constantly sang Ticky Tacky Tickyyy whenever we could, wishing we were Robert Wyatt.
And we loved Mike Ratledge's what we called 'vital monotony', these chord-changes repetitions, and we love the British fusion jazz approach much better than any of the American dito, maybe with the exception of Miles Davis late 60s/early 70s efforts, Elton Dean's playing was brilliant, as well as the guesting musicians, we loved the free spirit moments here and there, we loved the Terry Riley:an stuff, we loved Hugh Hoppers bass-lines, fuzzed or unfuzzed. Yeah, we loved it as much as we still love it.
Definitely an evergreen inspiration for our own making of music.

My copy is the latest CD re-issue (Sony/BMG 82876872932) to which it's added a bonus disc, the famous concert recorded at The Royal Albert Hall 13th August 1970, the one in which Robert W went out for a smoke just before start and then the guards didn't want to let him in because they thought he was a bum or something...

Take care
O'