GHETTO RAGA

"Four Horses" to "Lark Rise".

2012-02-01T14:16:00.000+01:00

As Third Ear Band music is still living in some great new music composed and played today...

Here we have a new composition by Sedayne inspired by Dave Tomlin's "Lark Rise" (inspired by Thompson's book "Lark Rise to Candleford"...).

Listen to it and enjoy at: http://soundcloud.com/sedayne-fiddlesangs/four-horses-to-lark-rise

His author says: ""Four Horses" comes from the singing of Hocky Feltwell and can be heard on "The Voice of the People" volume 5, though I think something of John Kirkpatrick's version may have crept in there too somewhere along the way. It too deals with a lost idyll, lost to us anyway, a vignette of vanished country life that chimes nicely (I think) in with Dave Tomlin's horse-drawn adventures in the heady days of the sixties, which is to say innocently, peaceably, and an era as much vanished as that they were seeking along the vestigial byways of forgotton Albion, long since ruined along with so much of our fast vanishing rural heritage - the true soul of England's dreaming".

THE LYRICS:

"There was a young fellow who first drove a team

And he took great delight boys in keeping them clean
And in keeping them clean, boys, he showed a good colour
And he gained a good character by being a good fellow

And his first horse was a white horse as white as any milk
His second horse was a black horse her coat shone like silk
The middle horse was a bay horse, bay spot on her brow
And his shaft horse was a chestnut her coat shone like gold

And he drove them along til he came to the fair
He watered them here and he baited them there
He paid up his reckoning just like a good man
And they said here comes a team of horses so great and so grand

And he drove them along til they came to the pond
And he watered them here and he drove them along
His feet being weary, his legs being tired,
And his waggon being empty he jumped up to ride

And he drove them all home and unharnessed them all
There was Captain, there was Short, boys, there was Boxer and Ball.
He spread out their bedding and laid them to rest
And he always kept thinking straight home is the best!"

Thanks Sedayne for your great music, deeply inscribed in the purest tradition of the Third Ear Band!

As Glen and Dave would say: "Nice one!".

An unexpected fantastic never seen TEB short video on YouTube!!!

2012-01-26T12:33:00.003+01:00

An incredible fantastic short video of the TEB playing live at Hyde Park on June 7th, 1969 (at the so-called "Blind Faith concert") is available on YouTube thanks such "Classic Rock Video" (http://www.youtube.com/user/ClassicRockVideo: "Some choice clips from my collection. Most of which is shared here has been edited specifically for better YouTube enjoyment & not intended for archival viewing. Video has been made widescreen and wherever possible audio has been re-dubbed").

On stage Glen Sweeney (hand drums), Richard Coff (violin), Paul Minns (oboe) and Paul Buckmaster (cello) playing in front of a quite absorbed, relaxed and dancing (!) audience.

A unique, very rare document that at last can witness the great interplay of the TEB playing on live and their incomparable singularity!


Coff and Buckmaster


Glen Sweeney on hand drums

... the great interplay of the TEB playing on live and their incomparable singularity!...

Richard Coff on violin

The great Paul Minns

... a quite absorbed, relaxed and dancing (!) audience...

OTHER INTERESTING STUFFS ABOUT THE HYDE PARK CONCERT:
http://www.ukrockfestivals.com/hyde-park-6-7-69.html
http://ghettoraga.blogspot.com/2010/07/whos-that-man-on-left-side-of-backstage.html

Dave Tomlin's "Lark Rise": origins & cultural references..

2012-01-24T16:39:00.000+01:00

A recent object of debate here, Dave Tomlin's "Lark Rise" was quoted in the Antonello Cresti's book on the esoteric English folk music (read at http://ghettoraga.blogspot.com/2012/01/tebs-cultural-sources-on-italian-book.html).

The author wrote about it: "The incredible cultural background of Sweeney & C. shows to be much wider than one could imagine: for example, on "Lark Rise" the band tributes to one of the most influential character of pastoral revival, the composer Vaughan Williams, author of the legendary "The Lark Ascending"".

Reading this, TEB fan and musician Sedayne (Sean Breadin) commented: "I think it's more likely that the earthy folk simplicity of Tomlin's "Lark Rise" is more obviously rooted in Flora Thompson's "Lark Rise to Candleford" which celebrates a vanished bucolic utopia. As such it's the anthithesis of "The Lark Ascending" and maybe was intended as such given the more alternative routes (roots) taken by Tomlin on his travels, as oppose to the more overtly bourgeois take on the pastoral indulged in by Ralph Vaughan Williams, who was instrumental in a far more taxonomical/taxidermical approach to English Folk Music which relies less on actual mythic landscapes so essential to "Alchemy", than a romanticism which seems (to my ears) a complete anathema to it.
Sweeney's vision here is one of intuitive misrule; more that of the mischievous trickster than the earnest mystic. I guess his role of catalyst in this process will always keep us guessing!"

"Lark Rise" as soundtrack on YouTube for Salvador Dalì's paintings

Replying to his comment, Cresti has been so honest to admit that "about "Lark Rise", I've just expressed the possible link with Vaughan Williams just in footnote, as a possible way to think about that track. But I'm happy to know that we can find other explanations".

Dave Tomlin (London 2010)

Infact, new explanations has went directly from the composer Dave Tomlin I've contacted on January 9th and 10th by e-mails.
His first laconic answer has been: "Luca. It was indeed inspired by Flora Thompson's 'Lark Rise to Candleford'".
Just before, in a brief interview with him of February 2010, he had explained me that "I composed 'Lark Rise' on violin whilst travelling with horses and carts and came into London just as Glen was recording 'Alchemy' and did just one track before leaving".

Then, quite unexpectedly, on January 11th he adds: "I wrote 'Lark Rise' after reading the book in about 1968/9 long before there were any films of it. I was travelling with a group of hippies in horses and carts in the countryside at the time. I will say some more but I wondered if you have ever read my book 'Tales from the Embassy' Vol. II where the whole story is told. If you haven't I can send you some pieces from it which contain the places where the music was composed. This should give you plenty of material to write up. (...) There were also quite a few other folk dances that I wrote at the time and in the book are the written scores of these dances. Let me know if this is interesting and if so I will email the pieces".

The original music of "Lark Rise" painted by Dave Tomlin (courtesy of Dave Tomlin)

So, just because I never read the book, kindly he has sent me an excerpt just about the right period when he composed the track. It's taken from the chapter titled "Priddy Fair" where "Smith" is just Dave Tomlin:

"Towards evening, when the cider-house begins to disgorge its rowdy contents, and red-faced farmers with half-cut wives tumble their way out into the sunset, Smith feels his moment approaching. Twilight is deepening and lights are coming on over the coconut-shy and twinkle around the awnings of the tombola-stall and lucky-dip. Two or three revellers exit the gate in the wall and Smith opens his violin-case and lays it open at his feet. Then, a quick tune-up and he is off. Lark Rise, a new piece he has been working on over the last few days is now finalised, it leaps into life and his bow-arm is fresh and feels strong. He will play till his arm drops off, thus ensuring that the music will be curtailed in a natural and unpredictable manner.
Tipsy farm-lads surround him and mock-dance to the tune, but some of the gypsy wives are moved to lift their skirts saucily as they kick their legs high, while their husbands dance catchy little jigs and stamp their hob-nailed boots. Smith is going like the clappers but knows he cannot stand this pace for long. The dancers spin ever faster, driving up the tempo with claps and stamps and copious juice is spilt from sloshing cider-mugs. Now the Count and a few London girls turn up to further animate the dance, and Muldoon clomps away on the edge of the crowd.

But Smith is already beginning to tire, the effort to maintain this speed soon depletes his energy and his arm is in agony. ‘One more time,’ he thinks, gritting his teeth and plunging once more around the circular piece, and he is only just able to reach the end before his arm drops, squeaking like a rusty hinge to hang throbbing and useless at his side. The dancers want more but he cannot oblige, and unable to persuade him they drift away across the green, still jigging and hopping to try out their luck on the coconut shy. Back at camp Smith counts the takings, almost seven shillings. Not bad, he will live like a lord for some days".

Luca Ferrari and Dave (London 2010). Photo by Steve Pank

A new addiction from Dave went on January 13th:
"I took up violin around 1967. There are only a few violin folk styles but there used to be more. There is the Scottish fiddle style. The Irish Fiddle and there used to be a Cumbrian style. I know there used to be some English folk styles and tried to imagine what they might have been like. So when I was travelling with the horses and carts and passing through small villages I was writing some fiddle tunes. They were very simple pieces except in places I altered the time signatures to give them a different flavour. The book 'Lark Rise to Candleford' impressed me very much since it was about English village life before the coming of the motorways etc, and that's what I was looking for".

How happened Glen asked you just that piece of music?
"It was while I was travelling. I came into town for a few days to buy some strings. I ran into Glen in a cafè near the studio. He invited me to do a track on the album and I said I had one new piece called 'Lark Rise'".

Do you remember which was the mood in the studio when did you record the track?
"I didn't know any of the other musicians so can't really say what the mood was although they were all pretty 'moody'".

Flora Thompson

SOME INTERESTING LINKS ABOUT FLORA THOMPSON:

http://www.johnowensmith.co.uk/flora/
http://www.florathompson.co.uk/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lark_Rise_to_Candleford

Miracles from the Net: a sampler of "Stone Circle" in a DJ compilation!

2012-01-19T14:55:00.001+01:00

Miracles of the Net!

A sampler of "Stone Circle" (even if here titled "Lark Rise") is included in a compilation edited by DJ Snoodaard in "The New Worck" series ("Free exclusive mixes - Discover new music!").

This very suggestive volume, the # 428, is titled "Sacred Sounds" and comprises also tracks by Albert Ayler, Art Ensemble of Chicago, Harry Partch, John Fahey, The Residents... in a sort of 25:10 long composition.

Commenting this compilation, DJ Snoodaard says: "Mankind has a long history of worshipping Mammon and viewing itself as a divine being, still the true spirit is in the humbled, who feel they are blessed with existence and live in wonder."
You can listen and download it at http://thenewworck.com/genre/psychedelic/the-new-worck-428-of-dj-snoodaard

Origins and meanings of TEB alchemical iconography.

2012-01-14T12:23:00.000+01:00

As we know, at the beginning of its story, TEB used to have posters/flyers/covers with right references of the alchemical tradition adopting old obscure engraves as iconography. This is a brief look at the known TEB's alchemical references with some notes about origins and meanings...

One of the first TEB posters designed by Glen Sweeney in 1968-69 using the original engrave taken from "Cabala" by S. Michelspacher (1616). Glen wrote the motto Time travel is the alchemic Third Ear Band. About the meanings of it: the main character on front right is the alchemist who is wandering (blindfolded) until the rabbit (just as in "Alice in Wonderland"!) shows him the right way to the Opus Magnum: a palace at the top of seven stairs, indicating the seven steps of alchemic process.
At the corners of the engrave, the fourth elements written in Latin. At the top of palace's roof (with sun and moon on it) a phoenix symbolizing the "philosophic mercury". All around signs of the zodiac indicate the alchemic work will start on May (under the Taurus).

"Cabala" by S. Michelspacher (1616)

On this sketch of flyer probably designed by Sweeney note inside the tondo (a turned up egg) a picture reproducing an engrave taken from "Viatorum spagyricum" by Heinrich Jamsthaler (1625). The old engrave represents the alchemic First Materia with an hermarodite character (sun on left, moon on right) - with the Latin word "Rebis" (thing-two), the union of two principles, man & female, gold and silver - and a dragon, for Michael Meier "the fixed and volatile mercury" ("Atalanta Fugiens", 1617). In the alchemic tradition just the hermafrodite can defeat the beast. Infact sun and moon, together, can beat the "mercurial dragon": to kill him, in the alchemic practice, the alchemist have to extract the sulphur and lunar umidity ("Aurora consurgens", XVI century).

"Viatorum spagyricum" by Heinrich Jamsthaler (1625)

About the origins and meanings of the "Alchemy" cover, designed by David Loxley, you can read an old file in this archive at
http://ghettoraga.blogspot.com/2009/12/origins-and-meanings-of-alchemy-cover.html

Apart the main picture, taken from "Atalanta fugiens" edited by Michael Meier in 1617, an important role in the picture is held by the four snakes at the corners, just around the border of front and back cover. As Sweeney told during an old interview to I.T. magazine (issue 63, August 29th, 1969), “those serpents on the cover are completely magic – they are in a protected circle, they protect the whole album and the music on it”.

Infact, in some ancient traditions the snake "are represented as potent guardians of temples and other sacred spaces. This connection may be grounded in the observation that when threatened, some snakes (such as rattlesnakes or cobras) frequently hold and defend their ground, first resorting to threatening display and then fighting, rather than retreat. Thus, they are natural guardians of treasures or sacred sites which cannot easily be moved out of harm's way. At Angkor in Cambodia, numerous stone sculptures present hooded multi-headed nagas as guardians of temples or other premises. A favorite motif of Angkorean sculptors from approximately the 12th century A.D. onward was that of the Buddha, sitting in the position of meditation, his weight supported by the coils of a multi-headed naga that also uses its flared hood to shield him from above. This motif recalls the story of the Buddha and the serpent king Mucalinda: as the Buddha sat beneath a tree engrossed in meditation, Mucalinda came up from the roots of the tree to shield the Buddha from a tempest that was just beginning to arise." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serpent_%28symbolism%29).

Original EMI advert for the album (1969)

The original engrave from Meier's "Atalanta fugiens" (1617)

Also the back cover was designed by David Loxley from a book edited in 1718 by J. C. Barchusen titled "Elementa chemicae": Sun (sulphur) and Moon (mercury) - male and female - are two basic elements of the alchemic process (read also at http://www.labyrinthdesigners.org/alchemy-religious-art/sun-moon-at-the-turn-of-the-first-millennium/). In his ancient alchemic manual Barchusen described the sequence to get the Philosophic Stone through two different ways: one short, so-called "dry"; the other long, so-called "damp".

Original "Alchemy" back cover (1969)

"Alchemically speaking, the moon represents Silver, the Lesser Work, or Mercury. It conjoins with the sun, or Gold in the Greater Work. In more practical terms, the moon represents fertility, resurrection, occult power, immortality and intuition. The moon is a feminine property and alchemists would incorporate it with the sun (gold) to assure balance" (from http://www.whats-your-sign.com/ancient-alchemy-symbols.html).

About the sun, it is considered "the ancient alchemy symbol of gold. Worshipped in many cultures, specifically Egypt where Amon-Ra was personified by the evening sun setting at the end of the creative process. Alchemists understood the process of creation, and utilized the symbol of the sun to focus on creating desired effects in their practice – both physically and philosophically".

The original engrave from "Elementa chemicae" (1718)

On this 1969 poster the picture above on it was drawned probably by Sweeney from the engrave below, taken from "Viridarium chymicum" by D. Stolcius (Frankfurt 1624).

The four women represent the four elements: from left - earth, water, air and fire - and to the four steps of the Great Opera (the alchemic opera): under their foot the four grades of fire.

Note the reference to the "Alchemical exhalations" on the top, maybe alluding to the Aristotle's "Meteorology" - where the "dry" and "moist" exhalations of Aristotle become the (alchemical) sulphur and mercury of the eighth-century Islamic alchemists - and the clear reference to the classic dualism sun-moon... Note also the women breasts wryly designed by Sweeney just covered on the original engrave.

Viridarium chymicum" by D. Stolcius (Frankfurt 1624)

About the engrave below (made by Hans Weiditz c. 1520), it shows the classic room of the alchemist at work with all his tools.

"An Alchemist" by Hans Weiditz (c. 1520)

When I edited the live tape recorded on January 11th, 1989 in Sarzana (Italy), titled "New forecasts from the Third Ear Almanac", I proposed to Glen to use a little work made in 1986 by Italian artist Mario Balestrieri: a simple, evocative reference to the sun-moon alchemic tradition...

Regarding the last TEB records published by Voiceprint in '80's and 90's, manteining the alchemic iconography tradition better than the records produced by Materiali Sonori, they was designed by Carolyn Looker, Sweeney's missus.

"Raga live" (Turning Point 2002)

She used the Aegypto-Greek iconography of the snake eating itself (Ouroborus) symbolizing the cyclic time, the One in All, the Eternal Return, cyclic nature of things…
"It is believed to have been inspired by the Milky Way, as some ancient texts refer to a serpent of light residing in the heavens. The Ancient Egyptians associated it with Wadjet, one of their oldest deities as well as another aspect, Hathor. In Norse mythology the World Serpent (or Midgard serpent) known as Jormungandr encircled the world in the ocean's abyss biting its own tail" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serpent_%28symbolism%29).

Here and below, Carolyn put inside the snake also pyramids, Sphynx and a flying U.F.O....

"Live" (Voiceprint 1996)

On the cover below we have a variation of the snake's theme, also very common into alchemic iconography, with sun and moon with a snake. Note the design of them, just in the old alchemic tradition...

"Radio Sessions" (Voiceprint 1994)

From "Elementa chemicae" by J. C. Barchusen (1718)

Bibliographic note

A wonderful visual book about alchemic and hermetic symbols and iconography, partially used for this article, is "Alchemy & Mystic" by Alexander Roob (Taschen Verlag 1997, Italian edition 2011).
http://www.taschen.com

TEB's cultural sources on the Italian book about esoteric English folk music written by Antonello Cresti.

2012-01-08T00:00:00.000+01:00

As announced some months ago (read at http://ghettoraga.blogspot.com/2011/11/new-italian-book-about-english-folk.html), on the last new book about esoteric English folk music written by Italian researcher & journalist Antonello Cresti a place is also reserved to the Third Ear Band in the chapter titled "The Sixties: light and shade of the "Age of Acquarius".

There are an interview with the editor of this archive (for the author, "after the Glen Sweeney's death, we think he's the authority to refer to" - surely a too generous appellative) and an essay on the TEB's music cultural sources edited by Cresti himself.

If through the interview with me I've tried to focalize some themes already exposed somewhere here (i.e. the files in the essay section of this archive...), very interesting is the Cresti's recognization about the philosophical sources of TEB's music, probably the best and deepest attempt to propose a study about it.
He states: "(...) The name selected [for the band] is particularly pregnant and it lends itself to several interpretations, more or less all fascinating: if the great wizard-philosopher Paracelsus (1491/3-1541/44) referred to the Third Ear, there are several cultures that link it to insight and clairvoyance...".

"(...) So, to use this expression one could allude to new ways to listen, a ritual active interaction between musician and listener; to listen with the Third Ear can mean to inaugurate a new phase of musical consumption where you cannot measure a track using the traditional aesthetic criterion, but it's the sound by itself to take predominance, meant to independent medium of journey, transcendence and change". In Cresti's opinion, a way already choosen by Terry Riley with his masterwork "A rainbow in curved air" published in 1968.

Antonello Cresti (2011)

Analyzing the track's titles, the author writes: "This album ["Alchemy"] is full as ever of musical invitation (all the tracks are instrumental) to take a more deep and conscious form of spirituality up: (...) if "Druid" obviously alludes to Druidism, (...) more astonishing is a sequence of less attended allusions to their contemporary scene: "Stone Circle", probably the more extraordinary album's track, a sort of ecstatic circular dance lead by lines of oboe, it's a clear tribute to the mythical Albion lost in the mists of time, a scenario also evoked by "Dragon Lines", where gongs from Eastern tradition have

John Michell

juxtapose with a climax evoking in some ways some Medieval profane music. It's a clear musical transposition of pioneer theories of John Michell, who had transposed Chinese tradition of "Lung Mei" on English culture and told about "Dragon Paths". These "Lung Mei" (an expression we can infact translate as "Dragon Paths") are energetic lines discovered by ancient Chinese; from the heart of a dragon, usually laid in a valley among the hills, springs of energy have radiated, as it occurs with the "Ley Lines"".


A rare picture of a Druid Initiation ceremony at Glastonbury Tor in 1967.

At this point Cresti writes a digression about the Druid tradition rooted in England from the end of 1700, stating that it was in the Sixties that it started to influence the English culture.

Ross Nichols

"In this process", he writes, "an important date is doubtless September 22th, 1964, when the "Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids" was constituted, probably the most important organization devoted to the diffusion of the ancient knowledge of Druids, born in England thank to Ross Nichols - poet, artist, historian (...) - one of the key figure of the Druidism...".
"Just while the Third Ear Band is publishing its first record, Nichols spread all over England a Jean-Baptiste Pitois's book titled "History and Practice of Magic", a text had a strong impact on youth in this period, above all for who was interested into the reading of Tarots...".

"The incredible cultural background of Sweeney & C. shows to be much more wide than one could imagine: for example, on "Lark Rise" the band tribute to one of the most influential character of pastoral revival, the composer Vaughan Williams, author of the legendary "The Lark Ascending"".

Writing about "Third Ear Band", the 1970 second album, Cresti states that the group "proposed a reference to one of the most influential tòpoi of the ancient Greek philosophy, from Thales onwards. To talk about the four elements as the unique constitutional principle of reality was expecially philosopher Empedocles (492-430 BC), who asserted the original elements, or "roots", of all things was four - fire, air, earth and water; they are unchangeable and indivisible, they don't born and don't die, but join together and divide each other, originating all things. (...) The birth is just the mixing of the elements, the death is their separation".

Heraclitus

Talking about the album's tracks, Cresti tries to set all the band's musical influences up: from "Air", in his opinion "probably the most harsh and unpredictable track of the album", near to contemporary avant-garde music of Penderecki and Lutoslawski; to "Earth", "the more 'earthly'", "even akin to the Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring"; references to the Heraclitus's norm of Panta rhei ("everything flows") are expecially on "Water": "reality is not something of static but a flow keeps trasforming".

Paracelsus by P. P. Rubens

After positive considerations about the last phase of the band's history, at the end Cresti admits that "even if English scene has been so fertile, it will have many problems to produce something of so blowing up and radical as Third Ear Band have done".

Anyway, apart the pages dedicated to the Third Ear Band, Antonello Cresti's book is a great and fasciating guide to the English underground/esoteric/mystical music produced in the last century. An important, esclusive contribute to the knowledge of just a rarely investigated area of interest (above all in Italy) with a lot of original stuffs (as, first of all, the interviews with important protagonist of the scene...).

Antonello Cresti - "Come to the Sabbat"
Tsunami Edizioni (pages 384, € 22,00)
(http://www.tsunamiedizioni.com).

The author can be contacted on Facebook at:
http://it-it.facebook.com/antonellocresti.

SOME INTERESTING SOURCES IN THE NET TO KNOW MORE ABOUT SOME THEMES AND CHARACTERS QUOTED IN THIS FILE

Paracelsus

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paracelsus (Wikipedia)
http://www.alchemylab.com/paracelsus.htm

Jean Bapriste Pitois
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Baptiste_Pitois
http://www.tarotpedia.com/wiki/History_and_Practice_of_Magic

John Michell

http://www.johnmichell.com/ (the official Website)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Michell_%28writer%29 (Wikipedia)
http://www.forteantimes.com/strangedays/obituaries/1692/john_michell.html(an obituary by Bob Rickard)
http://www.sevenpillarshouse.org/news/item/memorial_john_michell_1933_to_2009/

Ross Nichols
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Nichols (Wikipedia)
http://www.druidry.org/obod/theorder/rossnicholsnuinn.html

Vaughan Williams

http://www.musicweb-international.com/Programme_Notes/rvw_thelark.htm (about "The Lark Ascending")

TEB music on Spotify platform.

2012-01-03T12:52:00.000+01:00

At the moment available just in some countries (UK, USA, Sweden, Spain, France, Finland, Norway and Netherlands), this new Web juke-box (with millions of tracks to listen) "comes in all shapes and sizes, available for your PC, Mac, home audio system and mobile phone". As they promises: "Wherever you go, your music follows you".

Very easy to start, just download and install Spotify (at http://www.spotify.com/int/), then search the tracks you like...

Some are the Third Ear Band records available:

TEB's Top Gear radio session recorded on July 27th, 1969 ("Hyde Park Raga", "Druid" and "Ghetto Raga"), Glen Sweeney's Hydrogen Jukebox (published in 1991), the quite horrible "The Magus" (2004) and the absolutely terrific "Alchemy" (1969) and the Elements album (1970).

For kollektors (with money) only: "Macbeth" test press on Ebay!

2011-12-30T20:22:00.000+01:00

An apparently very very rare copy of "Macbeth" test press (catalogue number EOP 80510) is on sale on Ebay just for $ 249.99 (plus $ 33 for shipping costs) from Japan (check at http://www.ebay.com/itm/TEST-PRESS-THIRD-EAR-BAND-MACBETH-EOP-80510-/290646483079?pt=Music_on_Vinyl&hash=item43abe16087).

This is the item description included:

TEST PRESS / THIRD EAR BAND - MACBETH / EOP 80510
CAT # : EOP 80510
JAPAN TEST PRESS
COVER : PROMOTION SLEEVE
VINYL : EX- ( HAS FEW TICS )

Just a little personal remark: who can spend this lot of money for a record like this?

"Shaman in the snow". A gift for Xmas and the Winter Solstice by Sedayne.

2011-12-16T18:02:00.000+01:00

Dear TEB obsessive addicts,
here we are with a very exclusive gift related to the Thirds from our friend (and great musician!) Sean Breadin, a.k.a. Sedayne.

A dream on friendship, shamanic poetry, Glen Sweeney and the snow (with a wonderful TEB medieval Xmas song at the end).

Sedayne, the Green Man.

SHAMAN IN THE SNOW

"Hi Luca,

a while back I sent you a mock up my friend Raymond Greenoaken did of the inside sleeve of "Alchemy" featuring himself as all the members. He's recently been in hospital having a heart bypass, which filtered into my dreams in the guise of Glen Sweeney as a guiding Shaman. Here's what I wrote about it:

Raymond was in my dream last night - we were up on the top of Glastonbury Tor with Rob Ayling watching Glen Sweeney dancing, chanting & storytelling in the snow with a huge Shaman's drum decorated with tiny animated figures which on closer inspection turned out to be Grayson Perry's interpretations of characters from the Beano & The Broons intermingled with graffiti from St Alban's cathedral - including the famous Hare, which was being chased by Baby Face Finlayson who in turn was being chased by PC Murdoch. Raymond asked Glen if he could play his whistle with his drumming, but Glen said (in those enigmatic tones so familiar to avid collectors of Third Ear Band bootlegs) 'You're not ready for that yet' before vanishing away into the blizzarding squall... All the while I just sat there, in trembling awe, my fingers numb, and my fiddle-faddle locked away in its case. On the way back down we stopped to take photographs of the hawthorns on which the blossoms grew through the snow in time-lapse unfolding before our very eyes...

Sedayne - Southwell

Two things worth mentioning here. One is a wee book I have somewhere of Christmas Games, Customs & Stories (Jack Spriggans and the Magic Bean indeed) which promises an abundance of fiddle-faddle stuff... & talks of maggots in a mad-man's brain. The other is the last time Raymond and I were at the top of Glastonbury Tor we played weird improvised Third Ear Band style music in the ruins of St Michael's to a wee gathering of tourists and hippies - that was a perfect sunny Friday in the Summer of 1985, on our way to the festival after a merry magical mystery tour hitching around Wiltshire... On that occasion I was playing my old viola, and Raymond his trusty Conroy penny-whistle and a Chinese hand-drum from Ray Man. That was the occasion that we first met Rob Ayling who came with us to the festival (which was a washout) & has been a pal over the years, and very succesful too with his Voiceprint label.

Raymond at the "Alchemy" tomb.

Festival memories are vague - I was carrying a newly bought copy of John Sampson's classic XXI Gypsy Folk Tales with me and I read out 'The Squirrel and the Fox' one night huddled from the downpour - a story which has been the core of my repertoire ever since. We also played with the synth group Another Green World, which was nice, and Robin Williamson dedicated Free Born Man of the Travelling People to the recently trashed Convoy & Raymond bought a Principle Edwards Magic Theatre album from the same stall as I bought Lol Coxhill's Fleas in Custard.

Anyway, Raymond's op was succesful & he's home now."

Rapunzel and Sedayne (2011).

Rapunzel & Sedayne's Third Ear Medieval Xmas song:

http://soundcloud.com/winterflora/personent-hodie-11-12-11

A special interview with Rapunzel & Sedayne about their last album "Songs from the Barley Temple" at:

http://www.ameliasmagazine.com/music/an-interview-with-rapunzel-and-sedayne-on-the-release-of-new-album-songs-from-the-barley-temple/2011/10/05/

The album is available at Police Folk Recordings:
http://www.folkpolicerecordings.com/home.html

Sedayne (2011)

You can contact Sedayne at:
http://ploughmyth.blogspot.com/

no©2011 Luca Ferrari (unless you intend to make a profit. In which case, ask first)

An interview with Paul Buckmaster from the Net.

2011-12-08T18:21:00.001+01:00

Surfin' on the Net I've found out a very interesting long interview with Paul Buckmaster made by Christian Dueblin for Xecutives.Net - The Swiss management network in 2009.
Do you think it's very indicative there aren't quotations on it about his past experiences with the Third Ear Band...?

"Paul Buckmaster has been active as a musiciansince the early 60’s. His musical life began in London,the city of his birth, with his taking up the cello at age four; he went on tostudy in Italy at theconservatory in Naples, and then back in London, at the RoyalAcademy of Music. He won a Grammy Award (2002) and early on, as arranger, metmusicians like David Bowie, Elton John, Chi Coltrane and others, for whom hiswork helped to launch their careers. In the interview with Christian Dueblin hetalks about his early years, his love for Italy, and how his music careerstarted. He talks about famous people in music history, such as Miles Davis,Angelo Branduardi, and Eros Ramazzotti. In addition to his many otherachievements Paul Buckmaster became famous as the composer for the movie TwelveMonkeys, a Terry Gilliam cult movie starring Bruce Willis, Brad Pitt, andMadeleine Stowe. Read below how a great musician discusses his work and allowsus a glimpse of music history and behind the scenes in the music business.

Christian Dueblin: Paul, very early you worked with some musicians and artists who have since become very famous, such as Elton John, David Bowie, Celine Dion, and others who were already world-famous, such as Eros Ramazzotti or Miles Davis. But before we talk about your relationship to these titans of music, I would like to ask where your musical interest and skills come from and what your early memories regarding music are.

Paul Buckmaster: I was born into an artisticfamily; my mother, who was born and raised in Naples, was a concert pianist, and hadattended the Conservatorio there as a piano student. In Italy the conservatory system is different towhat we have in England andin the U.S.In those countries you enroll in music college or conservatory after you havecompleted your regular high school studies, but in Italy the starting age canbe even as low as seven. (At age ten you usually have finished your primaryeducation). Then you can enroll as a student at the conservatory; regular highschool courses are given at the Conservatories and must also be attended.

At age four, I started attending a smallprivate school in London called the London Violoncello School, and continuedstudying cello under several private teachers until I was ten, in 1957, when mymother took me to Naples together with my sister and brother, where I was givena one-month-long audition with the cello professor, Willy la Volpe, during which heassessed me as eligible for a scholarship.

In Italy the conservatories arepublic, and thanks to my professor’s help, I gained a state scholarship. Mytuition fees were covered by that scholarship; all travel expenses, room andboard, were paid for by my parents. Between 1958-1962, I returned to the NaplesConservatory every year for eight months; the other four months of the year Iwas obliged to attend my secondary school in London, to complete my regular high-schoolstudies and to obtain the standard General Certificate of Education. Upongraduating secondary school (high school) I auditioned for, and obtained ascholarship to the Royal Academy of Music, where I attended as a cello student,graduating, with a Performer’s Diploma, in 1967.

Back then did you come into contact with filmscores or with musical arrangements? What got you interested in becoming anarranger yourself?

During my years as a cello student, I did notattend any composition classes, nor did I study orchestration. I had played instudent and semi-professional orchestras and chamber ensembles, but had noconscious interest in being a composer or arranger; I had been following mymother’s intention for me to become an international concert cellist. However,rather than follow my mother’s direction, during my early teen years andthroughout my years at the Royal Academy of Music, I developed a passion for16th and 17th century music, the so-called Baroque music — in other words,early classical music, and played in a number of 15/20-piece semi-pro chambergroups. My interest in that music was so great that, in August 1967, Iauditioned for a French chamber orchestra, but sadly was not successful inbecoming one of the two cellists in that group. My life would have taken a verydifferent direction had I become a member!

So, back in England, one month later, VivianJoseph, my cello professor at the RAM, phoned and asked me if I would like toplay cello as part of a small backing orchestra in a package tour with some popand rock bands. I said yes, and found myself touring England with Paul Jones, one of thefamous pop singers of that time, who, shortly before, in 1966, had “gone solo”after having fronted Manfred Mann’s band. The show opened with the comedy trioScaffold, featuring Paul McCartney’s brother, Mike, followed by the Hollies,with, as the solo act, the main attraction, Paul Jones.

(At that time, I did not know anything of, norhad I yet developed any interest in arranging.) One of the violinists in theorchestra was also a contractor, and after that tour he invited me to tour Germany withthe Bee Gees, which I did, and again found myself playing cello in a slightlylarger backing orchestra. That tour lasted the two months of January andFebruary, 1968. Getting to know the musicians in that band, led to me beinginvited, by one of the trombonists, upon our return to London, to attend arecording session, where I got to meet the producer, Gus Dudgeon, and thearranger, Tony Visconti, who later was to produce and arrange many memorableand brilliant recordings with David Bowie, T-Rex, and Marc Bolan, among others.The artist on that date was Marsha Hunt, who at the time was performing nightlyat the Londonproduction of Hair.

As you know, Gus was later to become EltonJohn’s principal producer. During the session Gus asked me about my musicalinterests, and as a result of that conversation, he invited me to his office. ThereI met the man who later became my first manager, Tony Hall. Tony at thismeeting asked me if I had done any arranging, to which I replied that I hadnot. He then asked me if I’d be interested in “having a go”, to which Ireplied, Yes.

Did you have the skills from your conservatorystudies such as being able to write musical notation or did you teach yourselfthe skills required of an arranger?

(Laughs) No, I did not have any arrangingskills. Of course, I could write notation, and had studied very basic harmonybut, as I said, had not received any tuition in composition or orchestration,which, in the case of serious composers, are one and the same. Nor did I knowanything about arranging, although I knew the most basic rules of classicalharmony, so accepting Tony Hall’s offer to write some arrangements wasdefinitely a big challenge. For this “audition-test”, I was given three songsto arrange, and as part of the materials needed, I was given the lead-sheets,and a tape of demos or original versions (two of the songs had already beenreleased commercially, so these were to be “covers”).

When I got home, and sat down, the enormity ofwhat I had taken on hit me, as I quickly realized that it wasn’t going to beall that easy. So I rushed out to the local public library and borrowed twosymphony scores, Beethoven and Haydn, took them home, looked at them and askedmyself just how the hell am I going to manage this. I borrowed those two scoresin order to see how they were laid out, but did not do a deep analysis. Also, Iwas not properly equipped with score-paper, so had to write it all out onparts-paper and draw my own bar-lines.

Not having developed any skills or techniquesalso left me with no knowledge of short cuts, which would have helped, as I wasto be present at EMI Studios, Abbey Road, at 9:30 AM for a 10:00 AM downbeat. MeetingTony Visconti a couple of weeks later and showing him what I had done, heshowed me where I could have saved some time and trouble.

So, as it was, I burned through the night, andturned up on time for the recording session, which consisted of a basic rhythmsection, small string and wind sections. Everything went fine, and everyone wasvery pleased.

I was thrown (or should I say, I threw myself)in at the deep end, and had to sink or swim … and managed to swim (laughs).

I then went on to do more arranging work, andhad a couple of minor hits with the British band “Arrival”, and did someenjoyable arranging on two albums by British folk artist Mike Chapman, whichreceived very favourable reviews.

Then, at a meeting with Gus Dudgeon and TonyHall at Gus’s office in June 1969 I was introduced to a young guy, David Jones,better known as David Bowie. They played me a demo of "Space Oddity” andasked me to do the arrangement for it.

The recording session took place a week or solater, and the rest is history.

What can you tell us about David Jones aliasDavid Bowie back then in the Sixties? What are your memories of him 40 yearsback?

David was not very famous at that time, butwas well known in the greater London area andwhere he lived in South London. He was aprominent figure in what were known as “Arts Labs” (Arts Laboratories), wheredifferent artistic and experimental arts events took place. Arts Labs servedthe local communities; smallish gatherings of people with similar culturalinterests, which included, but were not limited to painting, sculpture,theatre, music and dance.

David and I got along very well, and likedeach other right from the beginning and had lots of good times.

Here’s something your readers might findinteresting: Space Oddity was a big hit in the U.K.,and thrust David suddenly into the limelight, but it was not released in the US until afterthe successful and safe return of the Apollo 11 Mission. Knowing that that Mission and the concomitant First Moon Landing wereoccurring at the same time as the release of Space Oddity, in July 1969, RCAdid not release it in the US,because, as you know, the text of the song is about a space disaster. It wouldhave been wildly inappropriate for listeners to hear that song, until theApollo 11 crew had safely returned to Earth. Thus, it took a little bit longeruntil it also became a hit in the U.S.

How did it come about that you had the chanceto work with Elton John?

That is interesting: I had become veryattracted to jazz when I was nine and had avidly listened to all styles,including the music of the post-war period, which as you know has severalidentifying names: Bebop, “Modern” Jazz, “Cool”, etc. During this period, Idiscovered the music of Miles Davis, and became a devoted fan. When we firstmet, and during the first few months of getting acquainted, Tony Hall did notknow of my love for Jazz, and Miles Davis’s music, nor did I know of his closefriendship with Miles.

Now, Miles was due to play, in November 1969,at the Hammersmith Odeon (London),today called the Apollo. I had tried, in late summer, but was not able toobtain any tickets; the concert was apparently sold out.

At that time I had been involved as arranger,composer and conductor, on an instrumental album project for Parlophone (EMI)called Sounds Nice, featuring pianist/organist Tim Mycroft. Gus was theproducer, with Tony Hall as the executive producer. The album consisted ofvarious major and minor hits done as instrumentals; and both Tim and myselfcontributed some original pieces. One of my pieces, called Summer’s End, wasinspired by Miles Davis’s music, and when I told Tony Hall this, he said “Ididn’t know you were that interested in Miles — do you want to go to his Odeonconcert?” It was at that moment I discovered that Tony was a close friend ofMiles, who would visit him every time he came to London.

The day after the concert, Tony and his wifeBillie took me to meet Miles at the hotel; Tony was to pick up Miles and hiscompanion, Marguerite Eskridge, and take Miles to meet Ozzie Clark, a leadingfashion designer at that time. Later, Tony and Billie were our hosts at theirapartment, where he told Miles that I had been doing some interestingexperiments with musician friends, and asked Miles if he would like to hearsome of this music, to which he replied, go ahead, Tony!

The piece he heard, Joint Effort, was recordedat a late-night session at Polydor Records’ studios on Oxford Street, London.I was there as part of a quintet backing band for Blues singer Chris Farlowe. Chrisdid not turn up for the recording, so finding ourselves with three hours’ freestudio time, I suggested we record some of our own music, and said that I hadsome basic ideas for riffs and themes, so we played free over these themes andmotifs I gave to the musicians, and recorded a non-stop piece, based on thegeneral tonality of C. That is, the bass riff and the “drone” tonality was C;this turned out to be a special feature of the whole piece: “C” was discovered,during the unfolding of the improvisation, to be a very special and meaningfultonal colour. We recorded 30 minutes of that stuff, and that was what I playedto Miles that afternoon at Tony’s place. He sat beside me and listened to thewhole piece, and at the end of it, he was silent for a few moments, then said,in his husky voice: "Buckmaster, you’re a son-of-a-gun” (laughs).

He said that he had recently been doingsomething like this; he was actually — without naming it — referring to BitchesBrew, which was not released until March 1970.

When finally I heard Bitches Brew four monthslater, I realized only then how amazing it was for Miles Davis to make acomparison with that jam, but I knew why he had heard a certain correspondence:it had to do with the way I had set the tonal center of C, and how that factorassumed a particular emotional significance in the sense that can be aroused bycertain kinds of tonality — I was mind-blown! He had also developed the tonalconcept of C as the most important musical feature of the title track in themost incredible compositional way, and with a far more complex and interestingharmonic structure; one aspect being the use of the scale C-Eb-E natural-G-Ab-B; and another, the following 2-measure chord cycle: Measure 1: C; (2beats) B; (2 beats); Measure 2: E/G#(8th-note)-E (4th-note)-B (anticipated 8thinto beats 3 and 4). This, as everyone who is familiar with the piece, is thecontinuously repeated motif, or riff (that great bass part is the motor),throughout the piece, except for the extraordinary intro and interlude, whichis bookended as the finale.

I’d just like to add here, that I considerBitches Brew to be, so far, in the realm of music in general, one of the mostamazing albums ever recorded, and, for me, one of the greatest. It is music offierce beauty and intensity, and cannot be categorized. Miles himself, who wasunerring when it came to all things to do with music, directed the label, andthe sleeve-designers, to place, above the title, Directions in Music by MilesDavis. All those who like to describe this unique work using meaninglessclichés such as “Jazz-Rock” or “Fusion” absolutely have no idea what they’retalking about. One more thing: in the forty years since its recording, nothinghas been heard — at least, by me — that even remotely approaches itsastonishing brilliance.

That evening, after we had spent the afternoonat Tony’s, Miles’ quintet was due to play at Ronnie Scott’s Club, and Tony,Billy and I were guests at his table. During the dinner interval, Tonyintroduced me to Steve Brown, who in turn introduced me to a quiet young man,Elton John. Steve asked me if I would be interested in listening to some of hisdemos, to which I replied, yes. That was the beginning of the musicalpartnership which, as you know, was to result in many wonderful recordings.

By the way, that Miles Davis gig at Ronnie’swas one of the first color video recordings, shot that night by the BBC. JohnAltman, a British saxophone player, somehow obtained a copy of that gig — thankGod somebody made a copy, because the BBC, in order to save money, regularlywiped the tapes and used them again.

Elton John was not famous back then. Where didhe play at that time and what finally launched his terrific career?

He was really mostly known, I think, in the London rhythm and bluescircles. There were a lot of people playing that style in pubs, just as theRolling Stones did. As a skilled piano player and also a blues organist, Eltonwas playing in some bands at the time, such as that of blues musician and singerLong John Baldry. There were lots of blues bands like this playing all over theU.K., mostly in the London and South East area of England, playing local gigs inpubs.

Elton had already made one pop album, EmptySky, released, I believe, in 1969, but it sold few copies. It became of greaterinterest after the next album he recorded, which was the first I arranged anddirected.

The following day, demo tapes were messengeredover to me, to which I listened. I recall hearing the three songs on that tape:Your Song, Take me to the Pilot, and Sixty Years On.

I immediately called Steve Brown and expressedmy enthusiasm, saying these were great songs. Steve Brown had alreadyapproached the highly respected producer and arranger George Martin, and hadasked him if he would produce Elton’s next album, to which George replied thathe would, but only on the condition that he would also write all thearrangements. Since Steve and Elton wanted a separate arranger, they decidedthat a different solution was needed.

Both Steve and Elton had become aware of mywork over the previous year, so they called Tony Hall, who invited them toRonnie Scott’s that evening. Subsequently, they asked me which producer I wouldprefer to work with. At that time I only had worked with two or threeproducers, one of which was Gus Dudgeon. Since I loved working with him theanswer was easy, so having mentioned his name, they asked me to approach him. Itook a meeting with Gus during which I played the demo tape; he was reluctantat first, but within minutes I was able to convince him of my enthusiasm andconviction that because of the quality of the music, I knew how great it wewould make it sound. The rest is also history.

How was this process working with Elton John? Didhe have some very specific ideas or did you have total freedom?

Gus and I were given total freedom to do whatwe wanted. Elton told us, “You do what you like; I trust you completely.” Thatwas fantastic, because it gave us, and me as arranger in particular, thefreedom to be creative, and to make our visions and ideas come true. Ourapproach at that time was to work for the songs; the song came first above allelse; any consideration of the singer — apart from obviously working to makethe song sound as good as possible — was secondary. The principle was: The songcomes first! That was our approach to the art of recording music back then. Wetreated each song as an individual personality and character.

You are half Italian, half English and youbecame UScitizen in 2003. Your roots influenced your lifetime’s work obviously lookingat your career. You worked with superstars like Angelo Branduardi and recentlyalso with Eros Ramazzotti. It must make you very happy to go back to your rootswith something you really love doing: composing, arranging and producing. Howwould you describe your feelings for Italy?

I am forever grateful for that influence andmy roots. Among my earliest memories is the music of the great composers mymother played, and my childhood visits to our relatives in Italy. Amongthe major musical influences of my early life were of the liturgical composersof the High Renaissance, such as Palestrina, Victoria, Byrd, Orlandus Lassus,and then, even more profoundly, J.S. Bach, (some Vivaldi and Handel), Haydn,Mozart, the Prometheus Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, Schumann, Chopin, Dvorak …in short, all the Classicists. Later, I was to rediscover Purcell, and earliercomposers of viol-consort music, like Lully, and especially Marin Marais. Italy was central to all this in my life; forinstance, Bach was inspired by Vivaldi, and Handel resided for a long period inRome. Thatinfluence is very strong, right through Beethoven and of course Mozart. Themelodic sensibility of those musicians and composers has in it a strong elementof the Italian, and all of those giants took that knowledge and elevated it toan even higher level of brilliance. I personally very much adore Beethoven’smusic; he was the man who, like Prometheus, stole the musical fire from theoligarchic Olympian gods, and brought it down to humanity. For me, he is alittle bit like Wilhelm Tell in Switzerland,who brought the concept of the republic, and democracy or democratic thinking,to the people - at least it is what Schiller wrote down (laughs).

Branduardi and Buckmaster (Roma 1973)

Later still, in my late teens and earlytwenties, I began to explore the moderns, and the “avant-garde” composers.

I produced and arranged Angelo Brandudardi’s first album in Italy; recorded for RCA Italiana in Rome, at their greatstudio, which alas does not exist anymore — it was also the studio where EnnioMorricone recorded all the music for Sergio Leone’s westerns. Working withAngelo was great, and that first album launched his successful career.

I also worked with Toni Esposito, the funkyand very original Neapolitan percussionist, producing and arranging his firstrecord in 1974. Inthe early eighties I worked on two albums with celebratedsinger/songwriter/pianist Riccardo Cocciante, and in 1986 I worked with TeresaDe Sio, on an album of Neapolitan songs of the early 20th century. Having totalcreative freedom from both Teresa and her producer, Marialaura Giulietti, itgave us a nice opportunity to completely rethink these songs. Also contributingto the arrangements in a fundamental way, was pianist/keyboardist ErnestoVitolo. That was for me an incredibly enjoyable time in Italy!

This year in February I wrote the arrangementsfor five songs on Eros Ramazzotti’s new album, Ali e Radici. The producer,Claudio Guidetti, invited me to London toconduct the recordings, with a Londonorchestra, at Abbey Road Studios, in the big room, Studio ‘1’. That was myfirst time back in the city of my birth, since 1998. As you know, Eros is amongthe top three Italian male vocalst/songwriters, and is also very successful Spain and in Latin America.

At a certain moment in your life you came incontact with the movie business and you composed the scores for several filmproductions. The most famous, I would say, is your music for „Twelve Monkeys“,a cult movie with Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt, directed by Terry Gilliam. Beforewe speak about that movie, I would like to ask you when you first came incontact with the movie music business.

The first film score I was asked to composewas for the movie Friends, in 1971, for which Elton John was commissioned towrite two theme songs and three source songs. Let me explain: Your readers maylike to know that, in movies, “source” music is what comes out of a radio orTV, or a cocktail bar, or in an elevator, or supermarket, or a marching band,or street musician — that is, music as part of the ambiental scene. It is notpart of the dramatic underscore, although, it could be cleverly used as such,by the director/writer. The three “source” songs by Elton were to be heardcoming from transistor radios, and of the main, thematic songs, one wasFriends, and the other, Michelle’s Song. There was a third song, calledSeasons, which was mainly a reworking of Friends. The director, John Glibert,wanted the “Elton John sound”, which, at the time, meant that he wanted thatorchestral style, which led me getting the gig, arranging the songs andcomposing the underscore.

With my not having had any preparation inwriting for film, Gus Dudgeon, who produced the soundtrack album and the songs,took me to meet the famous film-composer John Barry, who explained one or twothings about scoring for movies, but what could I learn in a two-hour meeting? Again,I was dropped in at the deep end, and just about managed to swim!

What was your next step then and what broughtyou finally to Hollywood?

Elton’s second record, called Elton John, forwhich I had composed the orchestral and rhythm-section arrangements, was a hugesuccess in America.Initially, it did not do very well in England,but as soon as it became a big hit in the U.S., it bounced back home and tookoff there as well. This generated a lot of interest in Elton, and this successthen launched his stellar career. I subsequently worked on a number of albumsfor Elton: Tumbleweed Connection (1970); Madman Across the Water (1971); Don’tShoot Me, I’m Only the Piano-Player (1972); Blue Moves (1975); A Single Man(1978); Made in England (1994) and Songs From the West Coast (2002).

Then, in April 1972, I got a phone call fromMiles Davis who asked me to come to New York,so I booked myself on a flight the very next day, and stayed in New York, first in aMid-Town hotel, then at Miles’ house. I worked with him for about the nextthree months; we went in the studio with an extended ensemble, and recordedseveral sessions of music, which later were released as the album On theCorner, which was later to become, for a whole new generation, an important,seminal record. None of us who worked on those recordings foresaw that! Afterspending the rest of the summer in Los Angeles, I returned to London, where itwas Son of Dracula, starring Harry Nielsson, that was to be my next score work,a strange, odd movie that was produced by Ringo Starr.

Could you tell me a little bit about how youcomposed the scores and what the challenges are when you do a score for amovie?

As far as I can recall, VHS machines did notexist yet; certainly not at the time we did Friends. I also did not have anykind moviola or means of viewing scenes at home, so I could only go to theediting room of the movie production offices, to watch the sections of themovie and take notes. The music editor also took notes during the spottingsessions, which would then get typed up, with every detail of what was said bythe director, editor, music editor and myself, included. Of course this is allstandard operating procedure. Those ”spotting” sessions with the director, andeditors, to decide where music starts and where it ends are a very importantstep towards the final score. I also took notes there, went home and wrote thescore “from head-to-paper”, with the spotting notes and a copy of the script onthe table next to the score-pad. I had no access to a piano when working on Sonof Dracula, and had to be sure of what I was writing!

I also wrote some themes for some successfulBritish TV shows; one was called Nature Watch, which was a long-running seriesabout various kinds of disciplines in zoology and botany. I think there wereabout 36 episodes; the theme music was very distinctive, so when it came on atone of the prime-time slots — around 7:30 PM — people knew that it was time forNature Watch when they heard that music in the living room or in the kitchen. Ialso wrote and performed the music for several single TV documentaries.

Of course, I continued to work, as arranger/conductor,on various recording projects, with such artists as Judy Tzuke, Stevie Nicks,Carly Simon, Burton Cummings, Chi Coltrane, Eric Carmen, Leo Sayer, RodneyFranklin, and so on. One of the more interesting projects was the large,symphonic-style arrangements I was engaged to write, on The Grateful Dead’sepic Terrapin Station.

You are also the composer and arranger of thescore of "Twelve Monkeys“, a famous movie with Brad Pitt and Bruce Willis.How did you come to get that opportunity?

I was recommended for that work by TerryGilliam’s music consultant, Ray Cooper. He has been a friend – if a“long-distance” one - for many years, having met while we were both students atthe RAM. Sometime during the 70s, Elton’s office called me and asked if I wouldrecommend an all-round percussionist – that is, one who could read, and playnot only all the “non-specific pitch” (non-tuned) percussion, but also all thetuned instruments,: xylophone, marimba, vibraharp, glockenspiel, timpani, etc.

Well, I couldn’t think of anyone better thanRay, so I gave them his name.

By this time, I had become a permanentresident in the U.S., residing at Los Angeles, and had been working in amusic-production studio on Sunset Boulevard, run by my friend the record producer/musicsupervisor, Steve Tyrell, who had invited me to come to L.A., and write themusic for a film he was the music-supervisor on, Midnight Crossing, starringDaniel J. Travanti, Faye Dunanway, Kim Cattrall, and Ned Beatty (that movie waspretty awful, but was a chance to develop my skills). I flew over from Londonand at Steve’s invitation, stayed at his place while, together with Al Gorgoni,who composed about half of the score, I wrote and performed the score, usingsamples, synths, and working with MIDI-sequencing on my, by this time, thirdMac computer.

I remained in L.A., obtaining my permanentresidency (“Green Card” — which is actually pink), and working with Steve sevendays a week on such TV series as Frank’s Place, Snoops, the animation seriesPeter Pan and the Pirates, Jake and the Fat Man, Matlock, and others, severalmovies-of-the week (MOWs), such as The Sinking of the Rainbow Warrior, andCaptive. In 1992, Steve went back to record-production and I moved my gear intoan office next door, and was then commissioned to write the music for fourepisodes of Eerie, Indiana, which was great fun.

I then moved out of those offices, and set upstudio in my apartment, continued writing arrangements for record dates.

The call from Ray Cooper to meet the producerof Twelve Monkeys, Charles “Chuck” Roven came sometime early 1995; I took themeeting, just up the road from me at Chuck’s offices.

Chuck Roven showed me some stills from theproduction and some of Terry Gilliam’s production-sketches. I also read a briefsynopsis, and realized that the movie was based on Chris Marker’s extraordinary1963 short, La Jetée. Asa fan of science fiction, I was very excited to discover this, as I wasfamiliar with the story, and told Chuck about how I felt when I first saw it,in 1965.

Twelve Monkeys is basically the same storywith the time loop, but with a brilliantly conceived extended development. Chuckalso asked me if I was familiar with the music of Astor Piazzolla and I said,“Yes. I love Piazzolla’s music and his compositions!”

So within a few weeks I was back in London where I spent latesummer, till November 1995, collaborating with Terry Gilliam and Ray Cooper onthat movie. We decided to use one piece of Astor Piazzolla’s in the movie,taken from a suite, Punta del Este. As soon as you have a rough cut of themovie you want to see it with music. It is very common for the director to findmusic that already exists in order to get a feeling of how any given scene orsequence plays. The director and the editor take music from different sourcesand lay it in to picture to see how it goes together with the movie. It can beany music from anywhere, and you soon find out if it works. This is called a"temp” score, in other words, a temporary score.

It’s a great idea to mock-up a temp, andeverybody does it, but it is also tricky.

When the composer is called in one of thethings he asks the director is how married he is to the temp. If you come upwith something like the temp they would say: “But it’s like the temp!”; if youdo something different they might say: “But it’s not like the temp!” Sometimesthe director — or even the producers — can never be pleased; some of thegreatest film composers have had serious clashes with directors … you canimagine that it does not always work to convince the director and film team. Thegreat Jerry Goldsmith got fired from the sound-stage in the middle of recordinga score with a large, 80-piece orchestra. I understand that John Williams, themulti-Oscar-winning composer of movie scores like Close Encounters of the ThirdKind; the Indiana Jones series, the Star Wars saga, Schindler’s List, and manyother famous films, also got fired once. You have no right in the musicindustry to call yourself a film composer until you got fired once (laughs). Ihave had that dubious honour as well.

I suppose that the work together with directors can be very difficult, because they have their own specific view of things and a vision they would like to realize.

That is true! The director is the person who decides and rules. The producer might just love what you do, but finally it is the director who decides. If he does not like your music, you are off, so you had better follow and support the director’s vision. If you have a good relationship with him it can be great. I had a certain amount of freedom with Terry Gilliam, and when we listened to the temp with Astor Piazzolla’s music I said to him that I would not be able to compose anything better, and that this music was perfect for the film. It is like you asking an artist to do something like the Mona Lisa: that is generally not possible, so regarding Piazzolla’s music I could not come up with anything better. I said, “Terry, let's license it; I will rearrange it for the large orchestra we’ll have at our disposal, and make it sound fabulous.”

So, with his blessing, I went ahead and wrote a new arrangement — pretty much like the original, but expanded for the larger group, which turned out to be a 70-piece orchestra, and it sounded fantastic. The other piece of music which was temped in was the slow movement from a violin concerto by Jacques Loussier. I had a state-of-the-art home-studio set-up where I was living in London, and was able to try all kinds of different things. So I wrote something similar as wished for by Terry — we call this a “soundalike” — but soon realized there would be a problem with the copyright, as what I had written was fairly close to Loussier’s original, close enough that I knew there would be a problem. Jacques was contacted, we had a legal-musicologist expert take a listen, and indeed, this was confirmed. Jacques was not very happy with the situation; the musicologist determined that my reworking of it was sufficiently original that Jacques was agreeable to evenly splitting the writer’s share. That is another part of the story but it shows you what the problems and challenges can be when writing a score for a movie.

You were also involved in a James Bond scoreproject. How did that come about?

I had produced and arranged an album oftraditional Persian songs for an Iranian singer, Shusha, who lived in London. Very sadly, shedied last year from cancer. I had toured with her in Iran, as part of a five-piece band,in 1978, only a few months before the revolution, which was very interesting. Afterreturning from that tour she asked me if I wanted to help her with an album. Werecorded about ten or eleven songs, and it turned out okay, and received somevery good reviews.

This recording was somewhat of an experimentand, we both wanted to do another, having learned a lot from the first, butunfortunately that was not to be.

I had also worked, in L.A., as arranger/conductor, with CaroleBayer Sager on an album of her songs, and during that period, she had gottenengaged to Marvin Hamlisch, the great classic Broadway composer. I got to meethim, and a little while later, back in London,he was there to compose and conduct the score for the James Bond movie The SpyWho Loved Me.

I had dinner with him and Carole one evening,and had occasion to give him a copy of From East to West, the album I hadrecorded with Shusha.

A few days later he called and asked me tocompose two pieces in that style, which was a blend of Iranian, North African,Egyptian, and Arabic styles, for a couple of night-club scenes in downtownCairo or wherever, some kind of belly-dancing type of source-music. He gave methe tempi, and of course he attended the sessions, made sure he got exactlywhat he wanted, fitted exactly to picture. He also asked me to compose a “Themefor Anya” (Bond’s “love” interest), which not in the movie score, but Marvinneeded a piece to fill out the album, as there wasn’t enough music from thefilm itself.

So, there are three pieces by me on the album;two appear in the movie.

2002 you were awarded a Grammy. Did thisaffect your career in any way?

It was very nice to receive such widelyaccepted recognition, and it meant a lot to me. However, it did not change mycircumstances nearly as much as you might think. I received that recognitionfor the string arrangement on the song Drops of Jupiter by the U.S. bandTrain, and I’m very happy with how it sounds. It was a big hit in America, where it remained in the top twenty fora year, and although it did not reach number one in the USA it was inthe top five for several weeks. We would say here in the USA “this songhas long legs” (laughs).

Dear Paul, thank you very much for your timeand for this conversation. I wish you all the best and I look forward tolistening to your next projects in the music movie business as a composer andarranger!

(L-R)Pro Tools operator Aaron, Walter Afanasieff, Paul Buckmaster, Chris Man and Jay Landers in the control-room of studio ‘B’ at Capitol studios, Hollywood, January 2009

A PAUL BUCKMASTER DISCOGRAPHY

edited by Luca Ferrari

1969
David Bowie - "Space Oddity" (Philips Records) plays cello

Kevin Ayers - "Joy of the toy" (Harvest) plays cello

Bee Gees - "Odessa" (IBC Studios) plays cello

1970
Elton John - "Elton John" (DJM) plays cello

Shawn Phillips - "Contribution" (A&M) plays keyboards

Sounds Nice - "Love at first sight" (Parlophone) arranger/conductor

Mick Farren - "Mona (the carnivorous circus)" (Transatlantic) plays cello
Quatermass - "Quatermass" (Harvest) plays cello

Elton John - "Tumbleweed connection" (UNI) arranger

Michael Chapman - "Fully qualified survivor" (Harvest) strings arranger

1971
Elton John - "Madman across the water" (DJM) arranger & conductor
Mick Farren - "Mona (the carnivorous circus)" (Transatlantic) plays cello
Elton John - "Friends" (Paramount Records) arranger/composer

Rolling Stones - "Sticky Fingers" (Rolling Stones Records) plays strings

Rupert Hine - "Pick up a bone" (Archive) orchestra arranger

Shawn Phillips - "Second contribution" (A&M) plays keyboards

Claire Hammill - "One house left standing" (Island) plays cello/arranger

Leonard Cohen - "Songs of love and hate" (Columbia) arranger/conductor

Harry Nillson - "Nillsson Schmilsson" (RCA) plays strings

The Chitinous Ensemble - "Chitinous" (Deram) plays electric piano/cello, conductor
Chris Barber's Travelling Band - "Get Rolling!" (Intercord) plays cello
Elton John - "Madman across the water" (DJM) arranger & conductor

1972
Shawn Phillips - "Collaboration" (A&M) plays cello

Harry Nillson - "Son of Schmilsson" (RCA) arranger/conductor

Carly Simon - "No secrets" (Elektra) arranger/conductor

Third Ear Band - "Music from Macbeth" (Harvest) plays cello and electric bass

Miles Davis - "On the corner" (Columbia) arranger
Shawn Phillips - "Faces" (A&M) plays piano and
cello/ orchestral arrangements
The Rolling Stones - "Exile on Main Street" (COC) plays string
Chris Barber - "Drat that fratle rat!" (Black Lion) plays cello
Elton John - "Don't shoot me I'm only the piano player" (DJM) orchestra arranger

1973
Mott the Hoople - "Mott" (EMI) plays electric cello

Yvonne Elliman - "Food of love" (Purple Records) plays cello

Blood, Sweat & Tears - "No sweat" (CBS)

plays synthesizer/ARP synt
Caravan - "For girls who grow plump in the night" (Deram) plays electric cello
Shawn Phillips - "Bright white" (A&M Records) orchestration
Chi Coltrane - "Let it ride" (Columbia) strings and woodwind arranger/plays synth

1974

Angelo Branduardi - "Angelo Branduardi" (RCA) producer/arranger

Toni Esposito - "Toni Esposito (Numero Uno) plays synth, piano & electric piano
Harry Nillson - "Son of Dracula" (RCA) soundtrack conductor
Shawn Phillips - "Furthermore" (A&M) plays cello/keyboards

Carly Simon - "Hotcakes" (Elektra) conductor/arranger

Elton John - "Friends" (MCA) film soundtrack arranger & composer

1975
Thijs Van Leer - "Oh my love" (Philips) plays bass, cello, percussion, synth/producer, arranger & conductor

1976
Elton John - "Blue moves" (Rocket Records) conductor/arranger

William Lyall - "Solo Casting" (Vivid Sound) plays cello

Leo Sayer - "Endless Flight" (Warner Bros.) plays cello/synthesizer

Burton Cummings - "My own way to rock" (Portrait) strings arranger/conductor
Cado Belle - "Cado Belle" (Anchor) strings arranger

Neil Ardley - "Keleidoscope of rainbows" (1976)

producer/plays electric cello
Shawn Phillips - "Rumplestiltskin's resolve" (A&M Records) plays organ
Stomu Yamashta-Steve Winwood-Michael Shrieve - "Go" (Island) co-producer

1977
Grateful Dead - "Terrapin station" (Arista) orchestra arranger

Marvin Hamlisch - "The spy who love me" (United Artists) film soundtrack composer
Carole Bayer-Sager - "Carole Bayer-Sager" (1977) plays synthesizer

Real Thing - "4 from 8" (Pye Records) strings arranger
Jeane Manson - "Lovingly" (Versailles) orchestration
Family of Love - "The Bible" (Polydor) producer
Stomu Yamashta's Go - "Go Too" (Arista) arranger
Aleksander Mezek -"Kje so tiste stezice" (RTV Ljubljana) recorded by

1978

Elton John - "A single man" (MCA) plays cello
Shusha - "From East to West" (Tangent Records) producer, arranger & director

1980
Kitaro/London Symphony Orchestra - "Silk Road Suite" (1980) conductor
Rodney Franklin - "You'll never know" (Columbia) producer & strings arranger
Angelo Branduardi - "Gulliver, la luna e altri disegni" (Polydor) arranger

1981

Angelo Branduardi - "Branduardi" (1981)

strings arranger

1982
Marc & the Mambas - "Untitled" (Some Bizarre) strings arranger
Riccardo Cocciante - "Cocciante" (RCA) arranger

1983
Paz - "Look inside" (Paladin Records) producer
Steve Nicks - "The wild heart" (EMI) strings conductor
John Miles - "Play on" (EMI) arranger
Nick Heyward - "North of a miracle" (Arista) strings arranger

1984
Stomu Yamashta - "Sea and sky" (Kuckuck) arranger
Meat Loaf - "Modern girl" (Arista 1984) arranger

1985
Rodney Franklin - "Skydance" (Columbia) producer
Mina - "Finalmente ho conosciuto il conte Dracula" (PDU) arranger
Mick Jagger - "She's the boss" (Columbia) strings arranger & conductor
Riccarco Cocciante - "Il mare dei papaveri" (Virgin) arranger & producer

1986
Teresa de Sio - "Sindarella Suite" (Philips) orchestra arranger & conductor

1989
Then Jerico - "The big area" (London Records) strings arranger
Belinda Carlise - "Runaway horses" (Virgin) strings arranger & conductor
Aleksander Mezek -"Podarjeno Srcu" (ZKP) orchestra arranger & conductor

1991
Dillinger - "Horses & Hawgs" (1991) plays strings/keyboads and arranger
Paula Abdul - "Spellbound" (Virgin) strings arranger

Lloyd Cole - "Don't get weird on me baby" (Polydor) conductor/arranger

1992
Damn Yankees - "Don't tread" (Warner Bros.) strings arranger & conductor
10,000 Maniacs - "Our time in Eden" (Elektra) orchestra arranger & conductor
Lionel Richie - "Back to front" (Motown) string & horn orchestration
The Heights - "Music from the television show The Heights" (Capitol) orchestra arranger
Kim Wilde - "Love is" (MCA) strings arranger & conductor
Warrant - "Dog eat dog" (Columbia) orchestra arranger & conductor

1993
E (4) - "Broken toy shop" (Polydor) conductor & orchestration
Robin Zander - "Robin Zander" (Interscope Records) strings arranger & conductor
The Williams Brothers - "Harmony hotel" (Warner Bros.) strings arranger & conductor

1994
Milla Jovovich - "The divine comedy" (SBK 1994)

arranger

1995
AAVV - "12 Monkees" (RCA) film soundtrack composer/producer

Joshua Kadison - "Delilah Blue" (1995) arranger

Country Joe McDonald - "Viet Nam Experience" (1995) plays cello
Spiral Life - "Freaks of Go Go Spectators" (Polystar) arranger & conductor
The Jayhawks - "Tomorrow the green grass" (American Recordings) arranger

1996
Celine Dion - "Falling into you" (Columbia) strings arranger & conductor

Counting Crows - "Recovering the satellites" (Geffen) conductor

1997
Jamie Walters - "Ride" (1997) conductor

AAVV - "Most Wanted" (New Line) film soundtrack composer

AAVV - "Scream 2" (Capitol) film soundtrack/strings arranger & conductor
Few Notes Overboard - "Tout Tourne Court" (1997) conductor

1998
Des'ree - "Supernatural" (Sony) audio mixer

1999
Veronique Sanson - "D'un papillon a une etoile"(Warner Bros) strings arranger & director
Tal Bachman - "Tal Bachman" (Columbia) orchestra arranger & conductor

2000
No Doubt - "Return of Saturn" (Interscope Records) strings arranger

2001

Train - "Drops of Jupiter" (2001) arranger

2002
Something Corporate - "Leaving through the window" (2002) arranger/conductor

Faith Hill - "Cry" (Warner Bros.) strings arranger
Shawn Phillips - "No category" (2002) producer/arranger

2003
Wilshire - "New Universe" (Sony) strings arranger

Something Corporate -"North" (Geffen) plays cello & arranger
The Thorns - "The Thorns" (Columbia) strings arranger & conductor
Deep Purple - "Bananas" (2003)

strings arranger/plays cello

2005
The Darkness - "One way ticket to hell" (Rhino Records) orchestra arranger & conductor
Tears for Fears - "Everybody loves a happy ending" (Gut Records) orchestra arranger & conductor
Bon Jovi - "Have a nice day" (Island) strings arranger
Keith Urban - "Be here" (Capitol) strings arranger & conductor
backStreetboy - "Never gone" (Jive) strings arranger
Faith Hill - "Fireflies" (Warner Bros.) strings arranger & conductor
Carrie Underwood - "Some hearts" (Arista) strings arranger & conductor
Longview - "Mercury" (Columbia) strings arranger & conductor

2006
Skillet - "Comatose" (2006) plays strings
Steve Tyrell - "The Disney Standards" (Walt Disney Records) strings arranger
Jesse McCartney - "Right where you want me" (Hollywood Records) strings arranger
Ben Folds - "Supersunnyspeedgraphic" (Epic) strings arranger & conductor
New Found Glory - Coming home" (Geffen) arranger & conductor

2007
Mika - "Life in cartoon motion" (Universal) strings arranger
Katharine McPhee - "Katharine McPhee" (RCA) orchestra arranger & conductor
Michael Bublé - "Call me irresponsaible" (Reprise) strings arranger
The Bravery - "The sun and the moon" (Island) conductor

2008
Guns N' Roses - "Chinese democracy" (Geffen) orchestra conductor/orchestra arranger

Amanda Palmer - "Who killed Amanda Palmer"

(Roadrunner) strings arranger/conductor

2009
Eros Ramazzotti - "Ali e radici" (RCA) strings arranger

Jamie Cullum - "The pursuit" (Verve) strings arranger
Mika - "Boy who knew too much" (Universal) plays strings

2010
Ben Folds-Nick Hornby - "Lonely Avenue"

(Nonsuch 2010) arranger/conductor

Did Italian avantgarde composer Luciano Cilio know the Third Ear Band?

2011-12-07T10:07:00.000+01:00

I don't know if Luciano Cilio knew Third Ear Band's music at the time when he composed and recorded his only one solo album titled "Discorsi del presente" [Speeches on the present], published in 1977 on vinyl by EMI (3C064 18253) in a limited edition of few copies.

But if you listen to one of the five album tracks, "Quarto quadro della conoscenza" [Fourth picture of knowledge], I think you can find some right references to the music of Sweeney & C., maybe more about the mood than the sounds.

For me (an Italian underground music writer) it has been an incredible and guiltily recent discovery - his record a great masterpiece of Pure Art that can be placed among other great Italian works of that time - Aktuala's, Claudio Rocchi's "Volo Magico" I & II, Lino Capra Vaccina's "Antico Adagio" , first Battiato albums, Alan Sorrenti's "Aria"...

Born in Naples in 1950, he was a self-taught composer and multi-instrumentalist musician, playing guitar, sitar, piano, bass and mandola. After collaborating with other non conventional artists (as Alan Sorrenti and Shawn Phillips) during '60's and '70's, he committed suicide in 1983 at 33, leaving us an album and few unrealised tracks (all included in a 2004 reissue on a 500 copies limited CD edition titled "Dell'universo assente", now sold out)... establishment ignoring him (but thanks his pupil and friend musician Girolamo De Simone we can now listen to his works).

Luciano Cilio - "Interludio" (1977)

Do you think he was a real genius? I think so and I hope you can enjoy his oblique sounds that remind me the Thirds, but also Popol Vuh, some acoustic dark English folker (i.e Nick Drake), the blessed Linda Perhacs of "Parallelograms", Bill Fay's second album, experimental musicians as John Hassel or Bill Frisell, or avantgarde composers as Mortan Feldman, John Cage and Giacinto Scelsi.

Download and listen to Luciano Cilio faboulous album at:

http://www.thesirenssound.com/2010/06/28/luciano-cilio-dell-universo-assente/

or at
http://hawaiianlostarchive.blogspot.com/search/label/Luciano%20Cilio

Reviews (in English) at

http://www.dustedmagazine.com/reviews/1719

http://www.tinymixtapes.com/music-review/luciano-cilio-delluniverso-assente

http://www.hydramag.com/2010/11/21/luciano-cilio-and-the-architectonics-of-heart-and-sound/

"The Lost Broadcasts" DVD: a review.

2011-11-29T15:17:00.000+01:00

Included on “The Lost Broadcasts” series by English label Gonzo Multimedia, this DVD features some rare television performances by the Third Ear Band recorded on September 11th, 1970 by the line-up with Glen Sweeney (hand drums), Paul Minns (oboe), Denim Bridges (guitar), Paul Buckmaster (bass) and Gasper Lawal on congas as a guest musician.

The session was recorded for the German TV programme "Beat Club".

Some philological considerations

The compilation consists of three tracks only - “In D”, “Hyde Park” and “Druid Grocking”.
According notes editor Jon Kirkman, the first (6:00) was "thought to be "Raga in D" a piece originally recorded at the sessions for the debut album "Alchemy"", but as every serious TEB fan knows (read on this archive at http://ghettoraga.blogspot.com/2010/10/5-teb-fans-cant-be-wrong-at-last-heres.html) this is a sonorous incredible mistake because actually "Raga in D" was recorded by the very first TEB line-up with acoustic instruments and very different harmonic/melodic structure (please download and compare the tracks Mr. Kirkman!)...
This DVD live in the studio version is instead the same "Eternity in D" played by the band at "John Peel Sessions" radio programme on January 7th, 1971 and recorded the same year in a Balham recording studios with the new title "Ghoo" (abbreviation of "Genetic Octopogillar Goo"): you can read a file at the page http://ghettoraga.blogspot.com/2010/09/ghoo-aka-eternity-in-d-rough-recording.html of this archive.

The Band performing "Druid Grocking".

About “Hyde Park” (8:33), we had that short version circulating on the Net among fans as "Hyde Park Raga", recorded live in the studio for the same "Beat Club" German TV programme on September 26th, 1970 (read at http://ghettoraga.blogspot.com/2009/12/hyde-park-third-ear-band-tv-video_09.html). This is a longer more experimental version, caratherized by brilliant extensive Paul Minns' solos but a poor, slack Bridges on guitar.

Buckmaster, Bridges and Minns performing "In D".

The last track is titled "Druid Grocking" (14:51) and according the DVD editor "was another track played during a John Peel Top Gear session in the Summer of 1969 and was an extended and adapted workout of the song "Druid One" from the "Alchemy" album".
A statement quite arguable because that known session for John Peel (aired on July 27th, 1970) included a track titled "Druid", presumably a live rendition of the original "Druid One"... (even if we know there are some tracks titled "Druid" in the TEB repertoire...).
Also we have no proofs that a track with the name "Grocking" on the title was played by the band for John Peel: you can check the great book edited by Ken Garrer titled "The Peel Sessions" (BBC Books, UK 2007) or read a file published here at http://ghettoraga.blogspot.com/2009/12/how-many-teb-unrealized-tracks-left.html
Instead it's possible that the correct title is "David Grocking".

The TEB on the stage: note the clouds in the back...

Rather intriguing some remarks written by musician/TEB big fan Sedayne about it: "I love the confusion over DRUID and DAVID - this obviously comes from the typeface used, where the R looks like an A and the U looks like V but I think I'll adopt the name 'David Grocking'.
If I recall right this isn't the first time DRUID has been mistaken for DAVID. I've got a laconic John Peel In Concert intro someplace in which he slights his secretary for making the same error...
And then some say Jesus of the house of David came to Glastonbury to become a druid. Listening to this music I can well believe it. Maybe his secret initiate name was David Grocking? After all in the Urban Dixctionary we read that "grokking" is:
'One who has graduated from penultimate hipster status, the educated hobo embodies various attributes from all walks of life, including those of the hipster, nerd, and mountain man variety. The educated hobo can oftentimes be seen grokking about. There can only be one educated hobo in existence.'
I'm cool with that!".

The Mysterious Man revealed: Gasper Lawal on congas performing "Hyde Park".

The music  

Even if I don't like too much this period of the TEB's story (no more esoteric/ritual, just music...) I have to admit the sound here is really intriguing and well played. Rather evident the references to Miles Davis' "Britches Brew" on "In D", but considering the presence in the band of Paul Buckmaster... who conditioned who?
Really fascinating this mixture of jazz, psychedelia, prog that was the trademark of the Band in those months, the brave attempt to mix 'old' instruments as congas (hand drums) and oboe with electric ones, with a very minimalist drums' playing.
The last track, among all, is a really good example of the futuristic cheeky approach to the sounds, with incredible improvisations by Minns, great bass groove and a quite remarkable work on guitar.
In my opinion "Druid Grocking" is the best performance, a clear confirmation the Band, after the 60's acoustic raga immersion, was experimenting brand new directions to the Land of Electricity, culminated in the wonderful Balham sessions (February 1971) and most of all in the gloomy sound of "Macbeth".

Sweeney on drums on "Druid Grocking".

The video
Quite static, the group is recorded playing in a studio on a low stage with psychedelic effects back (colours, bubbles, clouds taken from the second album cover...) that often distort the view.
Not that great masterpiece, in short.
Anyway, some interesting clues about the mood inside the band at the time surface: Sweeney and Lawal dress black sunglasses looking like proto 'punk', Minns and Bridges look hippy...

Sweeney and Lawal with a 'punk' look performing "Druid Grocking".

And what about the infamous double neck guitar played by Bridges that Glen Sweeney said it didn't work (interviewed by "Unhinged" fanzine in 1990)?
Here we have the definitive proof that he played both necks!

Denim Bridges with his guitar.

So what can we say about this unexpected DVD?
A great gift, indeed. The only one visual document about the Band from the first phase...
And by the way... when a DVD edition of the rare "Abelard & Heloise" short?

Paul Minns playing great solos on "In D".

Slivers of TEB music in other two recent Italian underground records...

2011-11-20T19:05:00.001+01:00

As we've seen, sometimes the pioneer TEB music resurfaces on some underground sound projects.
Two recent examples just come from Italy, published during this year.

A young Neapolitan composer called Salvatore Borrelli (a.k.a. etre) has published a beautiful record titled "Inferno From My Occult Diary" (Porter Records - http://www.porterrecords.com/id106.html) with five instrumental tracks of avant-garde experimental music.
Among the tracks, a 8:32 composition titled "Conseguito silenzio (for Paul Celan)" ["Silence achieved"] seems to come from the "Macbeth" TEB album for its incredibly gloomy mood. Listen to this sinister undertow of rumours, electronics effects, scanty violin chords, loops... that drop yourself in a dimension of dreadful desolate mediaeval landscapes... and decide if it could be an heritage of the Thirds...

You can download the record at http://hawaiianlostarchive.blogspot.com/2011/05/etre-inferno-from-my-occult-diary.html

or listen to the samplers at
http://boomkat.com/downloads/389634--etre-inferno-from-my-occult-diary#

and read reviews (in English) at

http://www.dustedmagazine.com/reviews/6428 and
http://www.baskaru.com/etre.htm

Salvatore Borrelli (born 1976)

Less direct references to the TEB music one can find on the album recorded and self produced by Eternal Zio, "Vibbria", even if some Italian journalists states that on the Web.

A sort of Italian underground supergroup (with musicians from Asabikeshiin, Rella The Woodcutter and Valla), playing hurdy gurdy, electric guitars, electronics, keyboards, harp, hand drums... their music is more psychedelic than proper avant-garde, a psych-drone contemporary folk inspired by krautrock, Popol Vuh, Aktuala.
On the only track (30:52 long) also some clear few slivers of the Eighties' Third Ear Band...

The Eternal Zio (2011)

You can download and listen to the record at:

http://www.mediafire.com/?4pu2o7ispoedlhp

Eternal Zio live at Cas'Aupa (Milan 11-03-2011)

"Necromancers of the drifting West". A 1996 essay on the Third Ear Band by Luca Ferrari. (part 1)

2011-11-16T17:35:00.000+01:00

On 1996, when I decided to write a book on the Third Ear Band, I got the kind collaboration of all the members of the group, except Richard Coff (apparently none knew where he was) and Ursula Smith (I forgot to insist with Glen for having her address).

In a first time the title intended for the book was "Tickling the Third Ear" and the idea was to make an historical cronological reconstruction of the TEB's story to free the band from that aura of mystery surrounding his story. But just at the end of writing, when I completed the essay for the introduction, I decided for "Necromancers of the drifting West": for myself, infact, the Band has advanced the so-called World Music and the multicultural/intercultural dimension of the relation between West and the rest of the world. At the same time, in my opinion, their music was a sort of sign, a monition of musical (and cultural) decline of the old Europe (for that reason the image of 'necromancers'). A group strongly political, I think, because "silence", acoustic (as natural) sounds (no words), minimalism aesthetic, are really 'political' today, in this age of excess of experiences.

I confess I've been very imprudent to write an interpretation of the TEB's music and probably, read today, this essay is quite outdated or at least arguable (also it's a sort of funny paradox in having set up an archive like this - so full of words! - to tell and document a music that didn't need to have words...).
I remember I asked Glen and Paul to excuse me for my hazard. They was so kind and indulgent to excuse me...

Anyway here I am with this old text. So please, excuse me you too...

(Note: the English adaptation was by Piera Testi)

MUSIC FOR THE THIRD EAR

FOR A CONSCIOUS LISTENING
I'm not persuaded that the sound of a certain historical period - in acertain society - forecast the times and the social models to come (J. Attali).
The immersion of sounds/noises we are submitted in these years seems to reflect the times (of triviality, superficiality, esteriority...) we live in, and it seems to describe them perfectly, evidencing the socio-cultural deep crisis in which West countries are and the negative impact of the Record Industry and the technology on the music creation and use.
The anonymous non-places (M. Augè), where music is absently used, acting as simple sound upholstery which brings and keeps company to the consumption, suggest the idea that the re-producing of sounds, and the hidden possibility to listen to music everywhere, have made the listening experience less the result of an active, conscious process and more the result of a passive unconscious behaviour.The advertising makers have understood this process with a great advance and as a matter of fact they use music to persuade people "in a pleasant way" to buy, thus showing our (just presumed) needs.
The music, which goes deep into our daily life, has turned in a non-place, deprived of any identity, history and relation with the time and the place of living, is a sort of undefined and virtual phenomenon.

Sweeney live on September 1970 (courtesy Facebook TEB's fans page)

The music surround us, and the chaos it determines (just try to tune on any 'free' radio station...) that melting pot of articles which remind us of something "already heard", the consumed symbolic appeals it evokes, the image aggression it goes with, reveals the shy hope of a creative, stimulating"transparent society" which is positively going on, which had seduced and deceived us on the threshold of postmodernity (G. Vattimo).
To oppose the silence to the chaos, as we hear from time to time, seems anyway a quick and candid utopia as it proposes a runaway (or happy island, or pure oasis, or ivory tower) where, on the contrary, some kinds of "creative resistance" (alternative voyages through personal, choerent inner routes) should be equipped (suggestive is a small book, as a renet example, by Chambers and Gilroy on Jimi Hendix, hip-hop and the evolution of thinking, published in Italy in 1995) to escape the risk to be dazed and submerged.

Bridges live on September 1970 (courtesy Facebook TEB's fans page)

There are solutions, but they are hard to get and they are placed in a prompt reasearch of a recent and perfect past of the popular music and in an analysis of the present, in spite of some difficulties which are inside any cultural outgoing phenomenon.
They are inside the variables of the popular music, since its origin inside the delicate balance freedom-conditioning: the relation between Record Industry and creation (product/goods-product/art), as first; the incidence of technology on the creative process: how 'releasing' is effectively the technological innovation, the usage of the more and more sophisticated sound-machines?; the relation between space and time of listening; the presumed authenticity of the produced musics and its consequent effect on the common imagination.
These criteria may favour a detached approach to music we are exposed to and inevitably immersed in every day. We could, at least, accept as a unique rule (not less right than the others, of course) the casual listening, as a simple daily background".

(end of part one - to be continued)

New Italian book about English folk with quotations on the Third Ear Band.

2011-11-10T12:18:00.000+01:00

A new book about English folk music has been written by Italian journalist Antonello Cresti. Titled "Come to the Sabbat. I suoni e le idee della Britannia esoterica"["Sound and ideas of esoteric Britannia"] it's an essay on that kind of folk related to esoterism and occultism

It'll be out at the end of this month, published by Tsunami Edizioni (http://www.tsunamiedizioni.com).

Inside of it (pages 384, € 22,00) there are also quotations on the Third Ear Band and an interview with the editor of this archive, showing this peculiar renewed continual attention to the Glen Sweeney/Paul Minns' project.
The author can be contacted on Facebook at http://it-it.facebook.com/antonellocresti.

"Fleance" and Chaucer's "Merciless Beauty".

2011-11-06T15:02:00.000+01:00

The music of "Fleance" - track included on "Music from Macbeth" - was composed by Denim Bridges during the sessions for the album.

Despite the fans' appreciation, as the same Bridges admitted on an e-mail sent to me on May 2011, "Glen and Paul hated that track because it didn't fit in with TEB concept". For myself, they was right...

Anyway the track, as we know, was sung by a very young Keith Chegwin with the lyrics based on a rondel poem written by the famous English poet Geoffrey Chaucer (1343-1400, a bio from Encyclopaedia Britannica at http://www.biography.com/people/geoffrey-chaucer-9245691?page=1) - titled "Merciless Beauty".

These are the track's lyrics:

"Oh your two eyes will slay me suddenly
I may the beauty of them not sustain
so pierced is throughout my heart keen
unless your words will heal me hastily
my heart's wound while that it is green
oh your two eyes will slay me suddenly
upon my troth I tell you faithfully
that you are of my Life and Death the Queen
and with my Death the Truth be seen
oh your two eyes will slay me suddenly
I may the beauty of them not sustain
so pierced is throughout my heart keen
so hath your beauty from my heart chased
Pity that it avails not to complain
for Pride doth hold your Mercy in its chain
guiltless my death hath ye purchased
I say you sooth there is no need to feign
so hath your beauty from my heart chased
alas that Nature hath in your embrace
beauty so great that no man may attain
to Mercy though he starve for pain".

Of course, this version is just a modern English adaptation of the original Middle Age one, that was this (note that the section used by Bridges for the track, probably provided to him by filmaker Polanski, is highlighted in red):

MERCILES BEAUTE

1. CAPTIVITY

"Your eyen two wol slee me sodenly,

I may the beaute of hem not sustene,

So woundeth hit through-out my herte kene.

And but your word wol helen hastily

My hertes wounde, whyl that hit is grene,

Your eyen two wol slee me sodenly,

I may the beaute of hem not sustene.

Upon my trouthe I sey yow feithfully,

That ye ben of my lyf and deeth the quene;

For with my deeth the trouthe shal be sene.

Your eyen two wol slee me sodenly,

I may the beaute of hem not sustene,

So woundeth hit through-out my herte kene.

2. REJECTION

So hath your beaute fro your herte chaced

Pitee, that me ne availeth not to pleyne;

For Daunger halt your mercy in his cheyne.

Giltles my deeth thus han ye me purchaced;

I sey yow sooth, me nedeth not to feyne;

So hath your beaute fro your herte chaced

Pitee, that me ne availeth not to pleyne.

Allas! that nature hath in yow compassed

So greet beaute, that no man may atteyne

To mercy, though he sterve for the peyne.

So hath your beaute fro your herte chaced

Pitee, that me ne availeth not to pleyne;

For Daunger halt your mercy in his cheyne.

3. ESCAPE

Sin I fro Love escaped am so fat,

I never thenk to ben in his prison lene;

Sin I am free, I counte him not a bene.

He may answere, and seye this or that;

I do no fors, I speke right as I mene.

Sin I fro Love escaped am so fat,

I never thenk to ben in his prison lene.

Love hath my name y-strike out of his sclat,

And he is strike out of my bokes clene

For ever-mo; ther is non other mene.

Sin I fro Love escaped am so fat,

I never thenk to ben in his prison lene;

Sin I am free, I counte him not a bene".

There're no proofs that the band played the song at live concerts, but a radio broadcast is documented on March 21th, 1972 during the radio programme "Drummond" (titled "Fleance's Song"): the TEB line-up was probably the same of the album...

The band appearance on the Polanski's movie (photo c0urtesy of TEB Facebook fan page): (L-R) Minns, Coff, Sweeney, Buckmaster and Bridges.

Just two anedocts to end: "Fleance", the only track with lyrics in the TEB first phase, was one of the Sex Pistols' John Lydon favourite as declared during a 1977 interview with Tommy Vance (read at http://ghettoraga.blogspot.com/2010/03/johnny-rotten-selected-third-ear-bands.html). Just recently, reader Timothy Sommer has confirmed me by e-mail: "During the 1990s, I was friends with John Lydon... He made a point of buying me some TEB albums, and explaining to me that it was one of his favorite bands and a huge influence on him...". A quite incredible thing, you know, considering how much distant is the (great) Sex Pistols music from the TEB's one...

About Keith Chegwin (his personal Web site at http://www.keithchegwin.com/), at that time 14, I've discovered in the Net that he told about the "Macbeth" recording sessions during an interview:

How the hell as a 14-year old from Bootle do you end up in a Roman Polanski Shakespeare production?
"Well it was weird; I mean, to go back even further, as a rough synopsis, I used – when I was eight years of age – to be a great fan of Des O’Connor. And I used to emulate him by coming out from behind the sofa singing Des O’Connor songs".
And what was it like working with Polanski?
"Well, Roman Polanski, great film director, they’d say “He not turn up today”. That’s all we ever heard. I was booked to work on it for six weeks, and ended up working on it for six months!".
Just because he didn’t turn up?
"Just because he didn’t turn up. Or he’d turn up and go “I feel ill, I go home”".
Were you paid per day?
"Yes, paid per day! The Evening Standard wrote an article, I’ll always remember, called The Gobstopper Millionaire, because of the money in those days…".

"Fleance" by the Third Ear Band (1972)

Apart "Fleance", a real hit song in TEB repertoire, for myself the "Macbeth" soundtrack is a really treasure of sounds and moods, a spectacular pagan mass of blood, death and sublime...

Revealed who is the conga player playing in TEB TV German appearance! (UPDATED)

2011-10-29T20:36:00.000+02:00

Thanks TEB fan Mirco Delfino (follow his interesting TEB Facebook's fans page at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Third-Ear-Band/156660855584?sk=wall) at last we have the right identity of the mysterious conga player who played at that TEB TV appearance on German music programme "Beat Club", recently published on an official DVD.

According a redear of that page, his name is Gasper Lawal, and all the clues are absolutely reliable.

From the notes of one of his solo 1980 album "Ajomase" we learn that "Gasper-Lawal, African percussionist extraordinary, is the son of Herbalist Asorono-Akejiwori Lawal. Born in Ijebu-Ode, Nigeria, Gasper came to England in the sixties and gigged with numerous African bands before deciding to involve himself with session work, as a means of expanding his musical horizons. He worked with Ginger Baker’s Airforce, Steve Stills, the Rolling Stones, Funkadelic, Joni Haastrup, Sonny Okosun, Barbra Streisand and many other names before joining Clancy in 1975. In 1977 Gasper returned to Nigeria for a while, returning to England to record ‘AJOMASE’ – which means “we all have to do it together”.

Gasper Lawal from the TEB 1972 "Beat Club" DVD.

Other infos come from another source (http://www.centrohd.com/biogra/l1/gaspar_lawal_b.htm):"Gaspar Lawal b. 23 September 1948, Ijebu-Ode, Nigeria. A percussionist and bandleader, Lawal left Nigeria to settle in the UK in the mid-60s. Basing himself in London, he became rapidly established in the session scene, and over the next ten years recorded with a large number of local and visiting musicians, covering a wide variety of styles, including Ginger Baker's Airforce, Stephen Stills, the The Rolling Stones, George Clinton's Funkadelic and Barbra Streisand. In 1975, he joined London-based rock band Clancy, leaving in 1977 to return to Nigeria. Moving back to London in 1978, Lawal formed his own group, Afriki Sound (later renamed the Drum Oro Band), creating a highly individual style which succeeded in marrying traditional West African roots music and instrumentation with elements of experimental rock and jazz. A fervent believer in the value of traditional African music, Lawal was also convinced that it needed to develop and could benefit from the incorporation of certain western ideas and influences. With Afriki Sound he released two superb albums on his own Cap label, "Ajomase" (which in Yoruba means ‘We all have to do it together’), which spawned two dancefloor hit singles in Kita Kita and Oromoro, and "Abiosunni" (Yoruba for ‘Are you sleeping or what?!’). Both albums featured the cream of expatriate African musicians living in London, notably Olalekan Babolola (percussion), Tunji Omoshebi (trumpet), Abdul Salongo (guitar), Don Amaechi (guitar/percussion/kora/keyboards), Ray Allen (saxophones) and Osibisa's Mac Tontoh (trumpet). In the mid-80s, Lawal was a founder member of Britain's Black Music Association, a pressure group which worked to achieve greater exposure and better working conditions for black musicians".

From a blog called Permanent Condition (http://permanentcondition.blogspot.com/2007/01/gasper-lawal-ajomas-abiosunni.html) we learn also that Lawal played on important underground albums as Graham Bond's "Magick" and Vivian Stanshall's first solo...
You can find him/his music on You Tube too:

A Gasper Lawal solo discography:
Ajomase (LP - Cap Records, UK 1980)

(free download at http://www.filestube.com/365a678b262dbdf603ea,g/Gasper-Lawal-Ajomas.html)

Abiosunni (LP - UK, 1985)

(free download at http://roddus.blogspot.com/2010/05/gasper-lawal-abiosunni-nigeria-1985.html)

Kokoroko (LP - Hot Records, UK 1986)
Kadara (CD - Globe Style, UK 1991)

Main collaborations:

Alexis Korner - "Alexis Korner 1961-1972"
(Castle Communications, UK 1986)
Funkadelic - "Funkadelic"
(Westbound Records, USA 1970)
Graham Bond -"We put our magick on you"
(Vertigo, UK 1971)
Stephen Stills - "Stephen Stills 2"
(Atlantic, USA 1971)
Vinegar Joe - "Vinerar Joe"
(Island Records, UK 1972)
Graham Bell - "Graham Bell"
(Charisma, UK 1972)
Babe Ruth -"First Base"
(Gramophone, UK 1973)
Vivian Stanshall - "Men opening umbrellas ahead" (Warner Bros, UK 1974)
Carol Grimes - "Warm Blood"
(Caroline, UK 1974)
Decameron - "Mammoth Special... plus"
(Mooncrest, UK 1974)
Babe Ruth - "Amar Caballero"
(Harvest, UK 1974)
Clancy - "Seriously Speaking"
(Warner Bros, USA 1975)
Joan Armatrading - "Back to the Night"
(A&M, UK 1975)
Clancy - "Everyday"
(Warner Bros, USA 1976)
Eddy Grant - "My turn to love you"
(EPIC, UK 1980)
Wishbone Ash - "Number the Brave"
(MCA Records, 1981)
Camel - "Nude"
(Cherry Red, UK 1981)
Hugh Masekela - "Techno-Bush"
(Jiva Afrika, UK 1985)
The Associates - "Perhaps"
(WEA, UK 1986)
3 Mustaphas 3 - "Heart of Uncle"
(Phonogram, UK 1989)
The Pogues - "Peace and Love"
(Island Records, UK 1989)

no©2011 Luca Ferrari (unless you intend to make a profit. In which case, ask first)

(file updated on October 30th, 2011)

Third Ear Band music on You Tube: the perfect soundtrack of creativity!

2011-10-25T18:06:00.000+02:00

You Tube is not just the slavish useless revival of the TEB's tracks right taken from the original albums, but it's most of all the place where TEB wonderful music can meet the Arts, becoming a very suggestive soundtrack of pictures, homemade videos, paintings, drawings... ideas.

Here is a list of videos where TEB music shows its brilliant vocation to become the perfect soundtrack!

"The Cat's Eyes" by Moebius-Jodorowsky ("Ghetto Raga").

"Totentanz" by Dino Battaglia ("Abelard & Heloise" pt. 6).

"A Midsummer's Night Dream" by W. Shakespeare. Drawings by Cristina Breccia, words by Norberto Buscaglia. Music by The Third Ear Band ("Abelard & Heloise" pt. 2 & 3).

Homemade video with TEB's "Eternity in D" as a soundtrack.

"An attempt to put images to a track by my all time favourite band". An homemade video by TEB fan Will Hulbert with TEB's "Mosaic".

Another homemade psychedelic video by Will Hulbert with a rare radio version of "Water".

A monologue talked in Italian based on a poem titled "Ho perso la testa per Salomè" ("I've lost my head for Salomè") written by S. Giovanni Battista on 32 A.C. The music is "Earth" by the Third Ear Band.

Illustrations from the rare "Mutus Liber" edited on 1677 by such Altus. The TEB track used for this video is "The Cauldron" from "Music from Macbeth".

"Les Songes Drolatiques de Pantagruel" painted in 1973 by Salvator Dalì. Music from TEB's first album ("Dragon Lines").

"The Mantegna's Tarots" with TEB's "Groom's Dances".

"The Magic Calendar", lithographs by Manuel Orazi printed in 1896. The soundtrack is the wonderful "Druid One".

"Waldkammer", the art of Madeline Von Foerster. The music here is "Abelard & Heloise" part 2.

"The Garden of Earthly Delights" by 'psychedelic' doped Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch. With the music of the Third Ear Band as a perfect soundtrack (excerpts from "Macbeth").

"Lark Rise" played by the Thirds as a musical comment for "Alchimie des Philosophes" painted by Salvador Dalì.

The incredible Hopi Dolls painted in 1969 by American Homer H. Boelter with the beautiful TEB's "Stone Circle".

A tribute to Don Cherry, Michael Hurley and the Third Ear Band (some quotations of "Eternity in D"...) by the genial post-folk-warrior Sedayne with references to the great Snock (the title of this track is infact "Snock Mandala").

Italian harpist VINCENZO ZITELLO tells his fascination for the Third Ear Band music...

2011-10-20T18:24:00.000+02:00

Vincenzo Zitello (http://www.vincenzozitello.it) is a very famous Italian harpist. Composer and concert artist, he started studying music at a very early age, playing the transverse flute and the viola. The first person to spread and pioneer the Celtic harp in Italy, from 1976, he dedicates himself to his musical studies, taking part in Breton cultural and musical seminars held at the “Ti Kendalc'h” with Dominig Bouchaud and Mariannig Larc’hantec. In 1978 he forms the harp and oboe duet with Roberto Mazza, author on 1991 of the wonderful TEBish private cassette titled "Scoprire le orme". On 1980 he specialised in the bardic harp and Celtic singing with the monster Alan Stivell. From 1986 he has recorded eight albums and had important collaborations with some of the most known popular music (Ivano Fossati, Pooh, Alice...) and folk Italian artists (Peppe Barra, Lou Dalfin, La Sedon Salvadie...).

Just this year he has recorded a brand new record, "Talismano" [Talisman], another important work about the Holy Land of the Harp.

Among his records, "Atlas", recorded in 2007, is directly inspired by the Third Ear Band's music, one of the favourite band ever of Zitello. You can listen some tracks of it on Zitello's Myspace at http://www.myspace.com/zitellovincenzo or buy the album on Itunes.
Starting from this evidence, I've asked him some questions about his connections with the Third Ear...

How did you compose "Atlas", the record you've admitted it's been inspired by the TEB's music?
“I’ve composed "Atlas" between 2006 and 2007. It’s a work I’ve thought about since the Seventies. On 1973, when I discovered the Third Ear Band, my music wasn‘t the same anymore, also the way to conceive it. For years I’ve considered them my masters of sound perception.  
With the musician with whom I was playing at the time [Roberto Mazza], I was really conditioned by them – both of us we loved really much their style and in some ways we imited them or, better, we was on the same track, for us they was an huge benchmark. 

"At that time I wasn’t playing harp, I played the violin, and listening to a band like them that was handling classical music in a contemporary creative way – but with such out of the way improvisational freedom, at the same time extremely alchemical and magic – where so many memories was converging, for myself it was a really innovative philosophical state of music. Most of all, it was completely out of the usual Rock soppiness of that time: it seemed to me something that aim to our soul, a dream...  

"On that days I was listening to very few music, I just consumed all the TEB’s records. Of course now I’ve got all their CD’s. 
Then the time brings you to other countries, but at that time I was so young, just 18, and very hardliner and obviously naïve about things. Now I’m 55 but I’ve never forgotten them… 
So all these impressions was the fuel to compose “Atlas”, a comeback to my origins in a more conscious way. 
For years I was thinking of doing a record inspired by the Third Ear Band's music, I wanted to do it in a contemporary and personal way, I’ve always looking in my composing spirit their magic, their colours. The instruments I use to play lend myself to it, and the peculiar mutation of the TEB music... Their track titles struck me. In my opinion they was an extraordinary thing, then and now...".

Which tracks composed by you are inspired by the TEB's music?
"It's more easy for me to tell you which tracks aren’t inspired by the Third Ear Band. No one!!!"

When have you met the Band?
"The person who let me know the TEB was Roberto Mazza. A great oboe player, with a wonderful sound. I suggest to music fans to listen to all his works. I think he’s the player who better has got the Paul Minns’ inheritance. We’ve played together for many years, until 1982."

Which are the main elements you've taken from their experience for putting in your music?
"Their sound becoming, the continuous mutations, the full and the melody that opens constantly to deep images, also their way to use strings and most of all their spirit: while I was composing some orchestrations I was thinking about that TEB music aura...".

                                   Vincenzo Zitello - "Celtic Raga" (live in Milan, February 2011)

Do you think they are still up-to-date? Why?
"I think their spirit is very relevant, indeed not much it's been done to spread them. Contemporary music needs new perspectives, in some way TEB music has been out of styles and fashions, but it contains a view that music needs. After rock, jazz and folk we need now a brand new music away from the trite styles, and I found in the TEB music excellent and still authoritative culture and inspiration for the present time, at least until the album titled "Prophecies"...".

Are you still listening to their records?
“Yes, of course. I prefer most of all “Third Ear Band”, but “Alchemy” is that enraptures me”.

How would you describe the TEB's music?
"I would describe it as a sound intuition, something that expands counsciousness in a magical way, and in the same time it is perfectly rooted in the European cultural memory. Eastern contaminations are the same of Western medieval music... TEB music has a wonder one can found in the Reinassance alchemical experimentations; a research that collect the collective memory of an organic freedom almost lost in Europe. Their sounds are real, they haven't temporal masks as like their perceptions that communicate. You can love it or you can detest it, because you don't understand it...".

Which is your favourite TEB's tracks? Why?
“My favourites are “Air”, “Water”, “Fire”, “Earth”, really amazing. Then “Ghetto Raga”, “Druid One” and “Stone Circle”.

no©2011 Luca Ferrari (unless you intend to make a profit. In which case, ask first)
 

New Third Ear Band DVD update.

2011-10-15T18:39:00.001+02:00

About the new TEB DVD titled "The Lost Broadcasts" recently announced at the page http://ghettoraga.blogspot.com/2011/09/lost-teb-video-brodcasts-out-in-october.html you can contact GONZO MULTIMEDIA (http://www.gonzomultimedia.co.uk)

at the address below:

by e-mail:

customerservicesgonzo@gmail.com (for all queries about products and ordering)

info@gonzomultimedia.co.uk (for general non-order related enquiries)

by post:
Gonzo Distribution Ltd.
c/o Brooks City,
6th Floor New Baltic House
65 Fenchurch Street,
London EC3M 4BE

Fax: +44 (0)191 5121104
Tel: +44 (0) 191 5849144

International Numbers:
Germany:
Freephone 08000 825 699

USA:
Freephone 18666 747 289

English Gonzo Multimedia has in its catalogue many other interesting videos with rare broadcasts of Incredible String Band, David Allen & Gong, The Byrds, Edgar Broughton Band, Hawkwind...

TEB quoted on the wonderful Rob Young's essay on English folk 'visionary' music.

2011-10-10T19:44:00.000+02:00

On the wonderful monumental "Electric Eden. Unearthing Britain's visionary music" (Faber & Faber, London 2010), an essay on folk music written by Rob Young, editor of famous English magazine "The Wire", a little place is dedicated to the Third Ear Band (with a generous quotation of this archive).

Here's the excerpt:
"(...) Harvest was also the home to the Third Ear Band, who pursued a rarefied version of Pink Floyd's abstract music of this period. They were a loose conglomerate of occult-minded instrumentalists that had its origins in The Giant Sun Trolley, one of the many acts appearing at the 14 Hour Technicolour Dream. Percussionist Glen Sweeney, the group's one constant member, began his career by seizing the bandstand in London's Hyde Park with several freaky friends, and playing even after the police informed them that music was banned from the park. (They politely asked wheather the rule applied to the birds.) After Sweeney and oboist Paul Minns took part in a December 1968 multimedia event at the Royal Albert Hall called The Alchemical Wedding - at which John Lennon and Yoko Ono conducted a forty-five minutes bag in - The Third Ear Band sculpted an esoteric chamber music from acoustic elements; their first album was duly titled Alchemy. With track titles such as 'Druid One', "Stone Circle', 'Dragon Lines' and 'Egyptian Book of the Dead', these were incantational songs-without-words, a ritualistic consort music whose atonal tinctures sometimes recalled the European folk-chamber music of Béla Bartok and the terse reductionism of Anton Webern, sometimes the free play of John Steven's Spontaneous Music Ensemble. John Peel even turned up to play Jew's harp on 'Area Three'. 'I call the music alchemical because it was produced by repetition', explained Sweeney, whose muted battery of hand drums shaped hypnotic hymns to the fearful symmetry of the elements and the heavenly rotations. This was not cultish window dressing, though: the group made connections with Druid orders and accompanied their dawn solstice ceremonies. Third Ear Band (1970), often referred to as Elements because its four lenghty improvisations 'Air', 'Earth', 'Fire' and 'Water', found the group - now a quartet with the addition of Ursula Smith (cello) and Richard Coff (violin, viola) - propagating a fungal acoustic music with spores of pan-European folk, Early Music and oriental drone dynamics. Their meditational medievalism found its way into two film soundtracks they created in 1970 and 1971: for a German television film about Abelard and Heloise, and for Roman Polanski's dark-age rendering of Macbeth. The Third Ear Band's arcane, absorbing music stands as one of several unexplored lanes leading away from the psychedelic garden that remains neglected and 0vergrown".
(Rob Young, "Electric Garden", pages 472-473)

Read the synopsis of the book at the Faber & Faber Web site:
http://www.faber.co.uk/work/electric-eden/9780571237524/

Visit Rob Young's blog on folk music at http://www.electriceden.net

no©2011 Luca Ferrari (unless you intend to make a profit. In which case, ask first)

Maybe an interview with Chief Druid David Loxley?

2011-10-04T00:23:00.000+02:00

Just in the first days of October, Steve Pank has sent me the photo below, portraying David Loxley (Chief Druid) during the druid ceremony of the Spring equinox in Tower Hill (London) on 2010. Just behind him Carolyn Looker, Glen Sweeney's missus.

As you know, David Loxley was very close to the TEB from the beginning, involved with Druids and drawing TEB's first concert posters.

Thank to Steve, maybe one day we'll have an interview with him about that years and the band's connections with the Druids...

Third Ear Band being almost reincarnated...

2011-10-03T18:50:00.000+02:00

ChrispH, musician of Norwegian avant-garde band Famlende Forsok, has answered me about the file published in this archive some weeks ago at the page http://ghettoraga.blogspot.com/2011/08/norwegian-band-famlende-forsok-quoted.html

"Hi,

I think maybe even our latest project also has references to TEB. We are about to finish an album as a result of three concerts we held during the last three years loosely based on drones/electronics/acoustics/poetry. I think this live piece also proves this to be a bit influenced to TEB in bringing "the oriental" into experimental western (unscholared "rock") music. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klf-x0X745w Sound quality is a bit poor. Plain old video recorder I guess. ChrispH (playing that lously Akai pseudo-shenai)".

Watch and listen to the track below: after three minutes of electronic carpet, infact, TEB seems almost to be reincarnated here & now!

Famlende Forsok live October 1oth, 2009

"The apprentice and the sorcerer" (part two). An old Italian article on the Third Ear Band.

2011-09-28T12:02:00.001+02:00

Here's the second part of the rare Italian stuff on the Thirds written by journalist Maurizio Baiata and published on "Ciao 2001" magazine on December 24th, 1973.

Thanx researcher Daniele Briganti (read him at http://stampamusicale.altervista.org/) we can read what one of the best (at that time) underground Italian music magazine wrote about the band, with common places, gross infos, cheap philosophy and some brilliant insights...

"(...) Black misterious pages, a draw full of strange and gelid signs, a music as a viaticum to the acoustic Hell: this is the Third Ear Band of "Alchemy", first record experience, first album thrown out in whirpools of the unknown in music, nothing of "dark" or the classic gastronomic flavour as like as Black Sabbath or Black Widow: strange stories of past and cruel times open in the grooves, collocation of historical order let you know how the group mainly persue a right rediscovery of the English and Scottish black folk music, with temporal movements limited to XI and XII century, with the rhythmic outstretched to rediscovery of cults dear to Ossian, then sung by William Blake and the other sepulcher poets. But there's a background mood that seem to miss: with the coldness of music contents something of indefinable is leaping in front of eyes, maybe that love for nature, that frantic order that rules human things.

"Alchemy" is a complex and difficult work, complete. (...) The basic sound has its rise in a monodic pulse most of the time created by the percussions, then it enriches with the strings and oboe, both played on patterns of an haunting and perfect iteration of rhythms: the picture will seem more clear if compared to Terry Riley's compositions, where the sound carpet, build with one or more incessantly repeated notes, is coloured with continuous superimpositions of synth and organ...

After some very strong (and sharable) observations about the Italian music at that time, Baiata analyzes TEB's second album, described as "the high point of their melodic and modal issue... obsessive, vitalistic, the sublimation of static and monodic music thrown on the lines of highest multiformity, the more charming and medieval rhythmic arcaism ever listened to.
For the author, "Earth" is "the mythical canto of joy, of creation's beauty, of human beasts and not, of the horse that neigh, of the rhythm of flower's growth, so misterious, and we have, with the Third Ear Band, an interpretation, an all European translation in harmonic terms - easy, linear, very sweet.
Among group's writings, these are the best lines, an absolutely supernatural composition, where also Riley bows...".

About "Macbeth", Baiata states that "it's not the work of ripeness, it's not the logical end of contacts with the band's extrasensorial music, but another little step along the road gotten to exceed the pattern of normal tonality, to destroy criteria of symmetry and geometry in force in England since the age of the Beatles ".
He claims the record, born under the soundtrack ambiguity, "has many static moments, even if played by first order musicians".
On the band's split, "happened just after "Macbeth" (but we know Sweeney and Minns played until 1975...), Baiata says "Third Ear Band's music existed just time before to be created, it was on the air, into the dreams of who came before, into the nightmares of every clever man, on the artistic measure of Self and on his power of theatrical performance of life's things".

Note for the Italian readers:
if you're interested to read the original Italian article please contact me through my e-mail dopachino@tiscali.it to receive a copy in PDF format.

THANKS! THANKS! THANKS! THANKS! THANKS!

2011-09-22T13:10:00.001+02:00

Just yesterday this archive, born by chance on December 1st, 2009, has reached

50.000 pages

opened!

Thanks to all the readers during these two years have contacted

GHETTO RAGA!

Lost TEB video broadcasts out in October!

2011-09-18T17:44:00.004+02:00

Lost Third Ear Band video broadcasts from 1970 will be distributed on DVD next October 3rd. The only one known circulating in those years was "Hyde Park Raga", included on a "Beat Club" compilation (read at http://ghettoraga.blogspot.com/2009/12/hyde-park-third-ear-band-tv-video_09.html ).

Titled "Third Ear Band. The Lost Broadcasts" is produced by Gonzo (catalogue number HST069DVD) and it will cost around ten pounds (11-12 euros)...

This is the commercial published on some Web sites:
"The Lost Broadcasts are a series of DVDs featuring performances that have rarely been seen since the original transmission on German television, in some cases more than forty years ago. Some of the artists featured within the series are legendary and these “Lost” performances will be a fine addition to any music fans collection. The series covers a number of styles and genres however all of the performances are of a high calibre. (...)

At the time of these performances which were recorded from September 1970, the band consisted of Glen Sweeney, Paul Minns, Denim Bridges and Paul Buckmaster, who would go onto work with Elton John amongst many other high profile artists. Three pieces were filmed on the 11th of September including the unreleased ‘Hyde Park’. The other two tracks were ‘David Grocking’ and ‘In D’, which is thought to be ‘Raga in D’. ‘Druid Grocking’ was played during a John Peel Top Gear session in the summer of 1969 and is an extended workout of the song ‘Druid One’ from the ‘Alchemy’ album. ‘In D’ is a piece originally recorded at the sessions for the debut album ‘Alchemy’.

The band returned to the studio to film once more on the 26th of September and this time performed another slightly shorter version of ‘Hyde Park’. Third Ear Band would go on to record a very famous soundtrack in 1972 for the Roman Polanski film ‘Macbeth’...".

Just a doubt about this project is related to the TEB line-up, because we know that on "Hyde Park Raga" ("Beat Club" TV programme) was involved also Benjamin Cartland...

But anyway we will see...

[Thanx for this signalling to Ed P.]

"The apprentice and the sorcerer" (part one). An old Italian article on the Third Ear Band.

2011-09-17T16:07:00.000+02:00

Thanks to the Italian researcher Daniele Briganti (read him at http://stampamusicale.altervista.org/) we have here a very rare article on the Third Ear Band published on the Italian magazine "Ciao 2001" issue 51 in late 1973 (December 24th).
Titled "L'apprendista e lo stregone" ["The apprentice and the sorcerer"] and written by Maurizio Baiata, it feels the effect of the times and the lack of informations press had in those days - between myth and fantasies... but with some brilliant insights.
This is the part one of a two-parts file.

For Baiata Third Ear Band's music is "greatly interior", a music that "finds a bigger reason to be in Eastern land, the world of notes and harmonies, and colours, and breaths, and delirious, all Western things that are simply the epidermic semplification of an inconscious and forgotten reality kept in life by the impenetrable Eastern world. But Third Ear Band doesn't play music as like as Quintessence or the Mahavishnu. We are here on a totally different level: where it does exist a preconceived and gratified harmony by epidermic European and American canons, the group reaches to dissolve it in virtue of an approach to that measures of preconceived music in the natural order of life's animated things - plants, men, thoughts or trees".

"The third ear

About the categorization of human psychic opportunities, Western culture shows very far from that Eastern's one: where medical, psychological and introspective techniques can define just a little portion of a very huge and mysterious area of knowledge, Chineses, Japanes, Indians show exactly (with cryptic ways) the contact points with the Known and the Unknown.

The five senses find a total universalization, signification deeply linked with the mind, with religion, with the man's intrinsic spirituality; and spatial and time dimensions loose their basic incomprehensibility connected to the scientifically correct study of nature. In the meanwhile the development and evolution of the Eastern sound tecniques show us clearly the opportunity of an interpenetration of art and spirit...(...)"

"First complete example of externalization of these principles about musical studies made in Europe is the Third Ear Band, where the etymology of "third ear" goes to discover an absolutely unknown sound dimension - interior and occult - filtered through the study of the human and the sound expression.

Of course the third ear is that unseen, hidden who knows where, but real and present in us: it is the organ with that we perceive sound vibration, we enjoy the music, we get it, we get inside it, we totally penetrate it; for this reason band's music leaves very few to spectacular and epidermic side, it unrelentingly get inside to meanders of "unknown in music", touching so the vertex of a sound great gestures...".

"(...) Third Ear Band is a group "sui generis" at all. It's beyond comparision, even if related to the English folk revival - an extraordinary brainchild...".

At this point the author analizes TEB records (talking about "Egyptian tablas" about Sweeney's instrument...), quoting the "Alchemy" album notes, and reporting a statement of Paul Buckmaster (with no quotation of the source): "When the band was formed, I was following some specific forms of contemporary music very near to the electro-acoustic TEB's line-up was doing, but at the end I joined the band just as a friend of Sweeney because I didn't like some their things. Music was origined from occult pratices, nowdays very popular in England: of course they wasn't black masses or other kind of oddities, just a deep study of the esoteric and fantastic history of the world, something of serious, almost religious and scientific that the musicians of the band was living in their lifes and into the music, but that I wasn't involved into: most of all I was interested to the monstrous technique of the guys, their furious eagerness of research and experiment, their courage, while to live they was forced to teach and to play often in tiny clubs and for audience full of freaks, spiritualists, disciples of various philosophy of occult".

(end of part one)

Note for the Italian readers:
if you're interested to read the original Italian article please contact me through my e-mail dopachino@tiscali.it to receive a copy in PDF format.

Italian composer STEFANO GIANNOTTI talks about Third Ear Band's music...

2011-09-07T10:55:00.000+02:00

Stefano Giannotti (born 1963) is an Italian composer, author, director, guitarist and performer. He studied composition with Pietro Rigacci and he has been the assistant of the famous Alvin Curran on “Crystal Psalms" and "Tufo Muto". Between 1983 and 1990 he performed in several European countries with the chamber music group Trio Chitarristico Lucchese (an acoustic guitar trio) and formed his first group called Ensemble Il Teatro del Faro. In 1997 he started a collaboration with the Italian choreographer Roberto Castello and between 1998 and 1999 he lived in Berlin. On 2000 he has been guest of the Kuenstlerhaus Schloss Wiepersdorf in Brandeburg and on 2002 he has been invited in Worpswede by the Ministerium of the Niedersachsen. The same year he has won the Karl-Sczuka-Preis (SWR, Baden-Baden) with his work "Il tempo cambia" and on 2007 he has got for the second time the Karl-Sczuka-Preis for his radio-piece "Gealogica".

On the present day he's playing with a new group, OTEME (Osservatorio delle Terre Emerse).
His repertoire ranges from performance, radio-art, dance theatre to chamber music, orchestral scores and songs.
Landscape, memory, life cycles, voices of people, languages are some of the main themes developed in Giannotti's work. His compositions have been performed in festivals, theatres, museums around the world and his collaborations included works for radios and TVs.
With one of his groups, Vaga Orchestra, he played a new arranged version of TEB’s “Water” from their 1970 second studio album.
From the Eighties he declares his deep appreciation for the Third Ear Band's music.

We knew 25 years ago at the time of the Ensemble Il Teatro del Faro, when I was involved with the management of the reformed TEB. You declared your great interest for their music: can you tell us how it's happened your encounter with the TEB's music?

"I've known TEB's music when I was 17 at the secondary school. In my classroom there was some friends of mine not studying music so deeply as I did but they had musical knowledge much more than me - they knew bands and artists I didn't know - I never heard about them. At that time I was listening to Genesis, David Bowie, Gong, Tangerine Dream, Van Der Graaf Generator and Mike Oldfield. They told me about Zappa (I didn't love him at the time), Soft Machine (the same), Henry Cow, Hatfield & The North, they made me know Robert Wyatt - a group of depth artists they was probably reading on some music magazines. Among these meetings there was also Brian Eno, Philip Glass and the Third Ear Band.
At the beginning, as for all these kind of music, they bored me, but after all through my personal peregrinations I've already bumped into La Monte Young and Igor Stravinski...
The Third Ear Band was a great discovering, I liked very much their approach to a kind of music that remembered me the Tangerine Dream and in the same time the popular theatre: I loved much the oboe, the ancestry of their proposal, maybe I was bored by the lenght and the repetitiveness of their compositions, but I got use to it quite soon.
Of course I had some disputes with my classroom mates about their music: I loved more "Macbeth", but the critics stated the other two albums was better, so my mates liked more that records.
There was also the pleasure for reasearching the records: infact in those days it was very difficult to find their albums in a record shop, and for that reason we did lend ourself one of two of them and we take them for many months..."

OTEME -"I was a mill"/CadutaMassi

Beyond to have included TEB music on some of your repertories, how much of their experience has gone in your music, about the sound research and the art of composition?

"The Third Ear Band has caratherized the sound of many works composed by me between 1991 and 1999. The Ensemble Il Teatro del Faro was made up with oboe/English horn, cello and electric guitar, with some other instruments as Indian organ, pan flute, ocarina, objects and toys. The music we played was quite different from the Third Ear Band's, but sometimes it contained the same spirit of improvisation and the love for that kind of sounds; maybe it was less similar about the hestetics, because, even if it was charaterized by improvisations, the most of my works is composed, not improvised".

Which are your compositions directly influenced by the TEB sound?

"The tune more directly influenced by it could be "La recita" [The play] from the suite titled "Ritratti, pagine e improvvisazioni su Amleto" [Portraits, pages, improvisations on Hamlet]. In this tune, electric guitar and English horn make a rhytmic sequence quite similar to the Sweeney's hand drums, and the cello sounds a melody, on a viola's extention, and at the end it improvises. Maybe it can recall "The Egyptian Book of The Dead", maybe more "Macbeth". Another tune surely is "Tema dei campi" [Fields' theme] that at last, after 20 years and a lot of different versions, this year it'll be recorded on a CD by my new group OTEME. On this composition the teponatzli, a percussion instrument similar to an ethnic marimba, play the continuous rhytmn, the oboe makes the melody, the clarinet does a rhytmic/melodic contracpuntual to the oboe and sometimes piccolo's phrases insert on it; the harmony is build by synth and electric bass. One of the first versions of the track (maybe composed in 1990) sounded as "Achemy", but globally my tune is more complex, because more contrapuntal.
There are some influences here and there on other compositions I've written: the last one is from 2010, an experimental video I made in Poland ("The Walbrzych Notebook": see at http://www.stefanogiannotti.com/thewalbrzychnotebook.html): on a sequence of the soundtrack electric guitar is played with a bow, and I remember just before to compose this tune I used for the film the "Abelard & Heloise" soundtrack.
I liked so much the combination that I stopped immediately to listen to it to avoid the risk to become prisoner of it and don't be able to compose some of mine. But at the end I composed a tune that remember in some way the Third Ear Band atmosphere."

Stefano Giannotti - "Corali III-IV"

How would you describe TEB music from a composer point of view?

"A music out of time and out of any label. As the music composed by Giacinto Scelsi, John Cage and Morton Feldman. These composers are very up-to-date in any age because they don't belong to a specific time, they are out of format. I've been so impressed to listening the TEB again after a very long time and compare them with other bands using the ethnic element in their work - as the Oregon, for example... TEB is unique, they don't smell of ECM or World Music, their semplicity is so disarming that one cannot apply the same critical categories as to a specific school of thought. It would be as lump everything together.
I can't labelled TEB music as psichedelia or etno-music, or minimal, because at the end none of this genres sounds as they play..."

Observing the condition of contemporary music (I mean his level of development), do you think TEB music is still up-to-date? Why?

Surely it's a music still very up-to-date, and it's shame (I'm polemic here!) you can hardly convince some young homo-sapiens to stop just for five minutes and listen to it (generally as for all sophisticated music). Periodically I do workshop about guide to listen to contemporary music and the Third Ear Band has a place of honour there. A lot of contemporary ethno-jazz is so predictable until the first notes... it's not the same with the Third Ear Band, maybe because the musicians wasn't so great virtuous, never rivers of notes as Paco De Lucia, but power of concentration, breath and sound. In some ways, as I stated, I find a parallelism with Feldman, Cage and above all Scelsi.

Giacinto Scelsi - "Quattro pezzi per pianoforte"

Sure, if you avoid any labels you bore the society and fatally you sink into oblivion.
Years ago I tried to arrange "Water" for Vaga Orchestra, an ensemble of students of music. The band was composed by two flutes, tenor sax, violin, keyboards, four guitars, Indian organ, bass and drums. Arranging the tune, I decided to round up for semitone every descending or growing note of Ursula Smith's cello. The harmonic result has been very interesting: a continuous stream of consonant and discordant chords perfectly tied to each other, creating a speech with sense in a harmonic point of view, never ordinary, that obliges you to listen the music until the end of the track. I never thought the cello was improvised on "Water", and I'm not still completely persuaded of it".

Visit Stefano Giannotti's Web site at:
http://www.stefanogiannotti.com

Stefano Giannotti - "Dal recinto"

OTEME - "Palude del Diavolo"

Norwegian band Famlende Forsok has quoted TEB as the main reference for one of its album.

2011-08-31T13:04:00.001+02:00

One of the great things of the Web is that one can discover little music treasures recorded by obscure bands around the world.

Famlende Forsok is a Norwegian band recording avant-garde music from the Eighties, known in the underground for interesting albums related to medieval folk, progressive, kraut rock, industrial... all strictly 'post'.

On a recent interview (read at http://www.lunakafe.com/moon180/no180.php), talking about their tribute album to the works of American gothic witer H.P. Lovecraft ("One night I had a frightful dream", Gurls Records 2003), the musicians quoted Third Ear Band as one of the main influential bands (with Popul Vhu) during the making of the record.

Asks the interviewer: "One night... stands out compared to your other works, not only because of the language and lyrics used, taken from HP's original texts. The music also seems a bit different, at times more old-fashioned with several acoustic instruments and more discreet use of electronics. Why?"

Brt: "We had loose atmosphere in the background, wanting to arrange came from Lump. We wanted a Third Ear Band-feel, or Univers Zero".

Chrisph: "We wanted initially the music to be directly inspired by our subjective understanding of the meaning of the words... This would possibly make it even more like effect-fuelled film music than earlier works. Next, on the other hand, there was also an effort to make more traditional tunes in there. This I guess is much due to the fact that the years before this release, Lump was much into his other band The Smell of Incense, which was/is very much folk/psych oriented. At the start the landscapes were much more ambient and lacking themes based on regular harmonies. So in the end One Night... probably is a bit of this and that. Some radio-theatrical, some film-like and some like the Third Ear Band...".

Famlende Forsok in 2007.

Over the disputable Web/social networks logic of the "if-you-like-this-listen-this", it can be interesting to verify the idea of the group about its music sources because, even on a superficial listening, tracks as "The festival", "The shadow over innsmouth", "Nyarlathotep" or "At the mountains of madness" have unequivocally a TEB's flavour, attesting once more the Band is still influential on contemporary music.

So download and listen to the Famlende Forsok's record at:
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=ZNXC8QTW
(thanks the great blog Mutant Sounds!)
A review of the record by Luna Kafé e-zine at:
http://www.lunakafe.com/moon82/no82b.php