The fantastic unreleased 40 minutes live gig played by the Third Ear Band at the Essen festival in June 1970 will be released soon by M.I.G. Music in two different formats: a vinyl record limited edition and a CD standard edition (with a booklet edited by me including a short story of the event).
The album is engineered by Manfred-Joachim Kaiser and mastered by Johannes Scheibenreif. The cover is a wonderful colorful drawing by Anna Vavatsis and based on this frame taken from a short video of the gig:
These are other frames taken from that great live event:
For further infos and updates go to the M.I.G. web site at http://www.mig-music.de/en/mig-music/
no©2024 LucaChinoFerrari (unless you intend to make a profit. In which case, ask first)
In the "West Meets East" tradition there has often been what I personally call "modal danger", that is the trivialization of some stylistic features typical of Indian, Arab and Middle Eastern music in general. Not everyone in fact has had the talent of Yehudi Menuhin, Yusef Lateef, John Handy, Don Cherry, John McLaughlin, the Incredible String Band or Embryo; most of the experiments slid onto a comfortable platform: you choose a key as a vehicle, add various instruments and improvise on some scale without taking too many risks. So there were very few results to remember in my opinion, and for a long time in classical, jazz and rock, everyone considered themselves experts but in fact those were just cheap ramblings for raga. The Indians realized the success of the formula by marketing a handy box called Digital Tampura that reproduced the sampled sound at any scale: an intriguing idea that many western artists have exploited in different contexts (myself included). At the end of the 60's T.E.B. had been one of the first projects to find a genuine alternative way and they had done it with great originality in a popular context, in contrast with the so-called serious music. The violin and cello acted as drone (tamboura-like) moving in and out of focus by expanding the basic tonality; thanks to the hand drums and the oboe they constantly shifted the listening, without having to be orthodox at all costs in the musical development. This had been the key to their success among young audiences at the time because the language was so open and accessible; surely their instrumental approach was competent enough to avoid the "modal danger" in an elegant way, a feature kept up to the end. I've always tried to avoid nostalgia, but these vintage T.E.B. recordings are welcome especially now: there's a timeless quality like coming from a concert hall that perhaps existed only in our imagination. This is the opposite of dense and intricate music, a constant and gentle flux but to my ears it's never boring; at times it seems to appear from a lifetime ago, but also firmly in the Here & Now: a rare quality indeed. I'm sure that this new 1970 performance showing the band at the peak of their creativity, will be a touching testament, an amazing addition to the wonderful "Abelard & Eloise" soundtrack. In that classic era, the presence of Ursula Smith was a guarantee: how a classically trained violinist managed to improvise in such a context will always remain a mystery to me... god bless her! Only the great Paul Buckmaster could replace her with a different perspective. With the recent appearance of the unreleased sessions for "The Dragon Wakes", almost the entire studio material is finally available, but these live documents further update the story bringing a refreshing new angle in T.E.B.'s music, like witnessing an endless spiritual journey, a never ending moment in time, that's the mysterious power of the recording medium...
ReplyDeleteIn a perfect world the Third Ear Band should be up there at the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame: rock and roll? Can you imagine them performing in 2024? I do... even if it's not rock and roll nor electronica, but it all started during an age where music was part of a cultural revolution, a unique time and place, it all makes sense now...
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