A new sensational retrieval: story (in two parts) of a rare 1970 TEB TV French broadcast hidden on the Web!!!

Few days ago TEB fan and reader of this Archive Spirito Bono has written me about an important discover he made surfin' on the Web:

"TEB seems to have been featured on the french tv show Pop Deux on May, 28 1970 as stated here :

Descriptive Information
Ina Number: CPF86653646
Programme Title: KEVIN AYERS
Collection Title: POP DEUX
Credits: Blanc Francard, Patrice; Ayers, Kevin; Third Ear Band; Grumbach, Rémy; Dumay, Maurice
First broadcast Date: 28/05/1970
Running-time: 002930
Summary: Patrice BLANC FRANCARD presents this third edition (publishing) of the POP program (emission) 2.
- The BEATLES sings let it be (purchase).
- Clips (extracts) of Kevin AYERS's concert given to the Inn of the Olympia.
- Service (performance) scènique of THIRD EAR BAND.
Category Information
Type of Archive: non theme-based archive
Type of Collection: Production
Type of Documentary Note: Isolated note
Genre: Magazine
Themes: Variety shows
Production Information
Type of Production: Production propre
Broadcasting Information
First broadcast Date: 28/05/1970
Time of First Broadcast: 225200
Channel: 2nd channel
Channel Name: Office Radio Télévision France
Technical Information
Status of Equipment: digitised

Unfortunately, it is not available on INA.fr.

But maybe there's a way to ask for it if duly authorised :
"The service is intended for audiovisual professionals working on projects that incorporate Ina documents, and potential buyers or prescribers of operating rights. These professionals include: researchers, producers, journalists, authors, directors, broadcasters, programmers, and exhibition designers..."

See: http://www.inamediapro.com/".

So I have contacted the Inamedia site trying to register me with the aim to get the video, but they answered me this: 

"Dear Luca Ferrari, We are sorry to inform you that we cannot register you to use Inamediapro, as the website is reserved for professionals working in the audiovisual sector.
You may, however, register on our website designed for public use: www.ina.fr.
If you are a student, a researcher or teacher working on French radio and audiovisual heritage, and can show that your research project requires you to consult documents under French legal radio and television deposit, we would suggest you get in touch with Inathèque.
Best regards.
The Ina team "

Thus I've jumped to the ina.fr site (http://www.ina.fr/) to register me and verify if that programme is available, but unfortunately it's not. Probably it's non available anymore or it's never been available...

Could I give up to it and risk to leave this treasure buried there?

Keep in touch and you'll see it in the second part of this new Web adventure...

(end of part one - to be continued)

no©2012 Luca Ferrari (unless you intend to make a profit. In which case, ask first)     

Again available for free download Roger Bunn's solo album!

Again available in the Net for free download (in the teeth of F.B.I.!) the great Roger Bunn's solo record "Piece of Mind" recorded in 1969 (Major Minor SMLP70, UK 1970). "A wonderful album", as famous DJ Pete Drummond said. "It's too musical and intelligent to succeed".

As everyone knows, Roger Bunn (1942-2005) was one of the three Giant Sun Trolley in 1966-1967, with founder Dave Tomlin and Glen Sweeney, but - as well documented at http://www.mensch.net/rogerbunn/ - he was much more: an intellectual, an agitator, a creative, original mind.

We like here to remember him.

                                                              One of the last photo of Roger Bunn.

You can download his record (in the good CD edition pubblished by Roller Coaster Records in 2005 with some bonus tracks) at the kaleidoscopic web site Plixid.com at:

http://plixid.com/2012/08/21/roger-bunn-piece-of-mind-19692005-mp3/

Anyway, you can buy a copy of the CD at:

https://www.rollercoasterrecords.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=2093&osCsid=dck5mo42fe5ti1tq0622i6ojn5 

                                                          Davey Graham and Roger Bunn live in 2000.

no©2012 Luca Ferrari (unless you intend to make a profit. In which case, ask first)    

New edition of the book on poet Harry Fainlight edited by Dave Tomlin.

A new edition of the book on the English poet Harry Fainlight originally edited by Dave Tomlin in 2008 is out now thanks Iconoclast  Press of London.

Harry Fainlight

Titled "Fragments of a lost voice" (67 pp.), it's dedicated to the eccentric iconoclast poet Harry Fainlight, dead in 1982 after a 47 years very troubled life (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Fainlight).

The book can be obtained making a cheque of 6 pounds to Dave Tomlin at:   1a, Princess Court, 68, Pilgrim's Lane, London NW3 ISP.

Phil Baker on a recent review of it published by "Times Literary Suppliment", the most prestigious literary newspaper in England: "One of the best minds of a generation destroyed by madness, Harry Fainlight was also the finest poet to emerge from the 1960s underground scene in Britain, transcending it and being much admired by Ted Hughes as well as Allen Ginsberg. For the present, however, he seems doomed to be remembered largely for his performance at the International Poetry Incarnation, a poetry happening with Ginsberg that packed the Albert Hall in 1965. It was filmed as Wholly Communion, in which Fainlight can be seen reading poetry that is too serious for his audience and becoming distressed when they begin to heckle. It was a characteristically troubled moment in a life spent in and out of psychiatric hospitals; at one point Faber and Faber offered to publish him, at Ted Hughes’s suggestion, and he responded by putting a petrol-soaked rag through the firm’s letterbox".

"In 2008, twenty-years after Fainlight's dead in a field from hypothermia, a suitcase was found in a Welsh barn that contained writings in his hand, notably the unfinished drafts of two poems, "City I" and "City II". Difficult to decipher, they are preserved in Fragments of a Lost Voice, in which twenty-two poets attempt to offer transcriptions and write short pieces of their own in response. The writers, all of whom have some personal link with Fainlight, are mostly unknown... 
The poems are concerned with air and earth: a warm evening (planes descending like "brinking brain seeds") and the underground ("thro' the transparent mirror/prehistoric strata flicker"). Fainlight is one of the few poet who could make "ripe overcooked radios" something more than word salad, and amid the unresolved ambiguities the peculiar finesse of his work shines through, with its distinctive spatial qualities and co-extention of mind and environment.
The transcriptions, with their many variants, have the fascination of Chinese whispers ("the first delicate weight" or "the first deluxe night"?) and the form of this little book is probably unique. It has been admirably put together by Dave Tomlin, who describes himself not as "editor" but "curator", reflecting the "archaelogical" nature of the project".

Between the 26 poets, apart the same Tomlin, give their contribution also Steve Pank, Ursula Smith and Allen Samuel, as we know very involved into TEB's story.

A great underrated visionary poet, Harry Fainlight, I have to admit it. Enough to read this fragment, taken from "From the notebooks", a transcription of a 1979 reading edited in 2006 by Tomlin:

"39

This is about cemeteries and death... about the philosophy of death as it presents itself today:

The miniature housing estates of nothing but tiny stone doors; as if everyone’s relatives had done some kind of Alice on them that nobody had ever really written up, and there was nothing else to show for it but these funny little stone doors indicating somewhere they had gone. For certainly the vast majority of the population had now gone over to the ‘little stone door theory’, and the cross idea had become some kind of minority cult. To adopt the cockney saying: ‘Put your religion where your monument is’, something with which any respectable archaeologist would concur; or were we only entitled to adopt the viewpoint of archaeology having reached the final means of these nowhere doors." 

London, early June, 1965. In town for International Poetry Congress at Royal Albert Hall. Poets sit on steps of Albert Memorial. Top Left: Barbara Rubiin. Back row L-R: Adrian Mitchell, Anselm Hollo, Marcus Field, Michael Horovitz, Ernst Jandl. Front row: Harry Fainlight, Alex Troicchi, Allen Ginsberg, John Esam, Dan Richter (photo: John 'Hoppy' Hopkins).

"Wholly Communion"(parts 1-4), the 1965 Pete Whitehead short documentary: in the very first sequences you can see Harry Fainlight reading his poem... Then, at 9.36, you can see Fainlight makes the integral reading with some interjections by the audience...).

A DAVE TOMLIN BIBLIOGRAPHY 

"Tales from the Embassy" vol. 1 (Iconoclast Press, London 2002)

"Bluebirds"  (Iconoclast Press, London 2004)

"Howling at the Moon" (Iconoclast Press, London 2004)

"India Song"  (Iconoclast Press, London 2005)

"Tales from the Embassy" vol. 2 (Iconoclast Press, London 2006)

"The Collected Mister" (Iconoclast Press, London 2006)

"Into the Holy Land"  (Iconoclast Press, London 2007) with Tony Jackson

"Tales from the Embassy" vol. 3 (Iconoclast Press, London 2008)

"A hole in the Wind" (Iconoclast Press, London 2008) 

"Harry Fainlight. From the notebooks. Posthumous pieces" (Iconoclast Press, London 2008) edited by Tomlin

"Harry Fainlight. Fragments of a lost voice"  (Iconoclast Press, London 2008) edited by Tomlin

"Power Lines" (Iconoclast Press, London 2011)

A DAVE TOMLIN DISCOGRAPHY

The Bob Wallis and His New Storyville Jazzmen (UK 1959) Played soprano sax "Pendulum" - Mike Taylor Quartet (EMI, UK 1966) Played soprano sax and designed the album sleeve "Alchemy" - Third Ear Band (Harvest, UK 1969) played violin on a track ("Lark rise") composed by him  "Ancient Gates" - High Tide (World Wide Records, Germany 1990) Played violin, keyboards and bass "Strange Attractor" - Hazchem (World Wide Records, Germany 1990) Played violin, bass, keyboards and guitar in some tracks "Star Map Excursion" - Hazchem (World Wide Records, Germany 1991) Composed two tracks for the album "Magus" - Third Ear Band (Angel Heart, UK 2005) Played bass and edited the CD booklet liner notes

             August 2010: Dave Tomlin (on left) with Steve Pank in London (photo: L. Ferrari)

Follow Dave Tomlin on International Times Web site at: http://internationaltimes.it/

no©2012 Luca Ferrari (unless you intend to make a profit. In which case, ask first)   

Paul Buckmaster's interview updating.

Paul Buckmaster in September 1970.

The announced interview with Paul Buckmaster, former Third Ear Band bassist, will be on next September, 2012.

no©2012 Luca Ferrari (unless you intend to make a profit. In which case, ask first) 

Who knows Brian Meredith?

Sometimes an obscure name from the past emerges on TEB's biography: Brian Meredith.  

Who was/is him?

In the past weeks I've asked my TEB-related friends (Dave Tomlin & Steve Pank) but none knows about him...

Steve wrote a laconic: "I don't remember a cellist with that name..."; Dave told me sardonically: "No, never heard of him. He maybe an alien".

Then, provoked by Steve, Carolyn Looker has got a sort of flash of inspiration saying she remembers him playing with the band in the early days, at Middle Earth.

This is confirmed by Clive Kingsley, the original TEB electric guitarist, that in exclusive old interview of this archive (read at http://ghettoraga.blogspot.it/2010/01/electric-raga-guitarist-interview-with.html) told me: "Glen also found someone to play cello, a chap called Graham (I don't remember his last name). He wasn't really a musician, but was quite keen! He was also rather nervous playing for people, but picked up the idea of being a bit like an Indian tampura quite well. 

A recent shot of Clive Kingsley.

We played a lot of gigs Middle Earth, UFO Club. Many other small clubs and a couple of concerts. There were people around with a lot of jealousy of the band and as well as of myself...
I think Paul Minns did play quite a lot better later one when he just had a violin to duet with. I went to see them in concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on one occasion about a year after I had left. I don't know what circumstances why he left the band, but did hear about 5-10 years ago that he had committed suicide. Graham, the original cello player, left when I think his cello went along with my guitar and amplifier".

Surfin' on the Net I've discovered a site of an English musician called John Green (http://www.skylinesongs.com/music_journey.htm), he played in some bands with various players.
In 1973 he formed Sugarcane and such Brian Meredith played drums with him. He remembers about that days: "I desperately need to make music again so I place an ad in the local paper to find players, and Tony Lloyd responds. He has a similar guitar playing style to mine, is keen to get a band together and we get on well together. We find a bass player, Bob Sharp, and a drummer, Brian Meredith, and we start practicing and gigging".

He has put this b/w photo of the band in the site:

Bob Sharpe, Tony Lloyd, Brian Meredith and John Green in 1974.

Brian Meredith is the guy with the white jacket. John writes about him: "A very competent, metronomic drummer, Brian joined when I put Sugarcane together in late 1973. Although a superb natural player I don't think he was as addicted to this band thing as the rest of us. He left abruptly in Spring 1974 when he met a girl at a gig, fell in love, and got married, all in a short space of time. The rest of Sugarcane weren't invited".  

Contacted John Green for having other infos, he was direct about this Brian: "Sorry, no. Brian played drums, not the cello".
But are we sure he played drums even in the early gigs with Sweeney? 
Does anyone know something more?

no©2012 Luca Ferrari (unless you intend to make a profit. In which case, ask first) 

The Dave Tomlin's pendulum. A real cameo in his musical career.

As reported two years ago during a brief interview with Dave Tomlin, just before to found the Giant Sun Trolley Dave played avantgarde jazz with some English musicians.

One of the most great and underrated artists was Mike Taylor (read a very inspired portrait by Richard Morton Jack at http://galacticramble.blogspot.it/2010/10/mike-taylor-mystic-who-looked-like-bank.html), died very young at 30 at the beginning of 1969 on dark circumstances.

Taylor and Ron Rubin in 1967 (photo Jak Kilby).

Tomlin was the soprano saxophone player of the quartet that recorded in October 1965 at the London's Lansdowne Studios the wonderful "Pendulum" (EMI Columbia SX6042), a rare example of great English jazz - "some of the most challenging music in the annals of British jazz, a busting-open of group interplay in a standard setting and some of the most interesting pianism in the modern canon", as Clifford Allen writes in All About Jazz site (http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/article.php?id=28473).

The vinyl, that become soon very hard to find (recently a copy of it was sold by eBay at around 2.000 dollars!), was published on May 1966 with a simple cover  designed by the same Tomlin (just in 2007 it was released also on CD format by Sunbean Records thanks to Richard Morton Jack but Universal ask him to withdraw it with the declared proposal to reissue it. Nothing happened, the CD is now really rare too...).  

As musician and jazz critic Ian Carr stated about the music of "Pendulum": "This is something of landmark in British jazz. It is one of the first recordings, perhaps the very first, made by the new generation of musicians who grew up when the 'hard-bop' or 'funky' school of playing was already losing vogue and prophetic voices were learning to pronounce more elegant slogans such as 'The New Thing'".

Mike Taylor in 1967 (photo Jak Kilby).

Asking Dave Tomlin to share with us his memories about the meeting with the talented Mike Taylor, he has written me:"In 1966 I was living and teaching music at the London Free School in Notting Hill Gate as I described in my book 'Tales from the Embassy". I hadn't see Mike for around a couple of years. One day there was a ring at the bell and when I opened the door there was a ragged and bearded man standing there, he was carrying a small drum. I invited him in for a cup of tea but he said nothing. We sat down at the fireplace and I looked at him and he glared back at me with much hostility. Then I suddenly realized it was Mike Taylor, up until that point I had not recognised him. He stayed for a few days during which time we went into the street. We passed a woman with a young child in a pram, the child was crying and the woman was shouting and screaming at it. Mike walked over and began banging his drum at her and glaring aggressively at her and that is when I realized where he was at. The acid he had taken had caused him to see the world as a nightmare, a woman screaming at a child like that was to him, demonic, and of course he was absolutely right. Everywhere he looked he saw hell, but of course we are all so used to it that we no longer see it. Being brought up in a middle-class family he had not seen it either but the acid took away his delusions and he really couldn't take it. That I believe is why he walked into the sea, he was in such terrible despair".

The Mick Taylor gravestone (first from left) at Southend cimetery: "Incidentally it was my brother Tony who searched all over the southeast for and found Mike Taylor's grave since no one knew where it was. It was he who put it up on wikipedia", has told me Dave (photo courtesy by Tony Tomlin).

And what about the recording sessions of that extraordinary album?
"There's not much I can say about the recording of 'Pendulum' except that there where no second takes as there probably are nowdays, we just went in and played the set once through and left. This was a pity for if we had been able to warm up and play each one a couple of times it would have been a better LP. Still we still seem to have got away with it".

Anyway now you can download all the tracks below at Rapidshare and appreciate the mastery of Taylor as composer (three original tracks - one, "Leeway", inspired/dedicated to Dave's daughter) and arranger (i.e. the classic "A Night in Tunisia"): as you'll realize, this is a downright Dave Tomlin's cameo, he showing us his talent with the soprano.

PENDULUM

1. "But not for me" (Gershwin) 5:54
https://rapidshare.com/files/1591424296/01 But Not For Me.mp3 
2. "Exactly like you" (McHugh-Fields) 2:38
https://rapidshare.com/files/3975984151/02 Exactly Like You.mp3
3. "A night in Tunisia" (Gillespie-Paparelli) 13:43
https://rapidshare.com/files/2353078749/03 A Night in Tunisia.mp3
4. "Pendulum" (M. Taylor) 7:43
https://rapidshare.com/files/504110084/04 Pendulum.mp3 
5. "To Segovia" (M. Taylor) 5:23
https://rapidshare.com/files/945625919/05 To Segovia.mp3 
6. "Leeway" (M. Taylor) 6:19
 https://rapidshare.com/files/482804356/06 Leeway.mp3

Personell

Mike Taylor - piano
Dave Tomlin - soprano saxophone
Tony Reeves - bass
John Hiseman - drums 

Producer: Denis Preston

On January 2008 "Jazzwise" magazine reporter Duncan Heining wrote a long article about Mike Taylor with some quotations by Dave Tomlin and an old photograph of him playing sax - maybe in the first Sixties. You can read the stuffs here below (courtesy the same Dave).

no©2012 Luca Ferrari (unless you intend to make a profit. In which case, ask first) 

100.000 pages opened in this Archive!

Just on June 30th, 2012 this Archive, born by chance on December 1st, 2009, has reached 

100.000 pages 
opened.

Thanks to all the readers around tha world who're followin' the

 GHETTO RAGA archive!

no©2012 Luca Ferrari (unless you intend to make a profit. In which case, ask first)

Soon an exclusive interview with Paul Buckmaster!

Thanks to Denny Bridges we've got a contact with musician/producer/sound engineer Paul Buckmaster. Soon we'll have an exclusive interview with him here.

Who is interested to ask him some specific questions, please contact me through my personal e-mail.

Paul Buckmaster on electric bass playing with Bridges and Minns in September 1970.

In the meanwhile, watch this interesting video from YouTube where Paul talks about his orchestral arrangements for the Grand Illusion song "Gates of Fire" realised in 2011.

no©2012 Luca Ferrari (unless you intend to make a profit. In which case, ask first) 

"I've left my heart in"... New Orleans. The dawn of Dave Tomlin.

At the beginning of his career, just some years before to form the Giant Sun Trolley and meet Glen Sweeney, Dave Tomlin worked as a session man playing the clarinet for some jazz bands.

Bob Wallis

One of them was leaded by trumpeter Bob Wallis (1934-1991), "a feisty British jazzman who had a handful of chart successes in the early 1960s, during the “trad” boom that directly preceded the coming of the Beatles and all the other Merseyside groups that decimated the number of UK jazz bands at that time".

"Wallis was a trumpeter with real drive and energy - one of his heroes was Henry Red Allen - as well as being full of life, remarkable for someone who suffered from ill health for most of his years. He played with his own band for much of that time, the Storyville Jazzmen, though earlier and later in his career he played with other bands as well.
Wallis was born in Bridlington, East Riding of Yorkshire, in 1934, where his father eventually became harbour master. At an early age he joined the local Salvation Army Band with his local friend, Keith Avison, who was to play trombone with Wallis for a number of years. By the age of 20 he had discovered the world of jazz and set up his own band in Bridlington which also played in nearby Hull.

"He went to Denmark for a short spell and made his first couple of records there - as vocalist with the “Washboard Beaters”. The skiffle craze was rampant at the time and the Wallis singing style was some of the most idiosyncratic ever heard. Once you grew used to the gravelly-voiced style, however, it became clear that the singing was essentially melodious and that Wallis could certainly carry a tune.

"Back in the UK, he went to London and played for a short time with Ken Colyer's Omega Brass as well as joining Acker Bilk. These bands were recording mainly for the specialist 77 Records label. Ultimately he joined up with Hugh Rainey's All Stars (Ginger Baker was their drummer at the time) and shortly afterwards the band changed its name to The Storyville Jazzmen, fronted by Wallis. In 1959 the band recorded an LP for Top Rank, “Everybody Loves Saturday Night” which entered the top ten album charts. A single followed and then the band moved to the more jazz-oriented Pye label where they made three albums and a number of singles which also had modest chart success.

" (...) When the trad boom ended in 1963, Wallis and the band, who had been TV regulars as well as having a long summer season at the London Palladium, effectively broke up. Wallis played with one or two other bands before moving to the Continent where he spent most of his remaining years, still blowing up a storm with reconstituted versions of the Storyville Jazzmen. Occasionally these bands included former colleagues, such as Keith Avison and Pete Gresham. Drummer Alan Poston was still playing with the band when it made its final recordings in the mid eighties. Clarinettist Forrie Cairns was also with the band for much of this time.

"Ultimately Bob settled in Zurich with a residency at the Casa Bar, where he finally found his spiritual home, much appreciated by residents and visitors alike. He continued to make records for European labels such as Storyville, WAM and Pebe, but the chart appearances were long gone. Nevertheless the band remained true to the Wallis ideals, with a driving style that owed much to his energy and fine sense of humour. Phil Kent, who was the bass-player with Bobs band during their residency in Zurich, is one of the few remaining members of the Storyville Jazzmen. He is still playing bass, and lives in Lydeard St Lawrence, near Taunton, Somerset.

"When it became clear in 1990 that his ill health was not going to improve, he returned to England with his wife, Joyce, where he died in hospital in 1991. His long battle with illness was over but his records attest to the fact that Wallis was one of the great British jazzmen of his time. His son, Jay, carries on the family tradition of playing trumpet" ("All about jazz" Web site, http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/musician.php?id=11743).

The CD cover where the tracks are taken.

From one of the rare Bob Wallis' sessions survived, here we have three tracks recorded in London on May 20th and June 1st, 1959 with Dave Tomlin on clarinet, Avo Avison (trombone), Pete Gresham (piano), Hugh Rainey (banjo), Brian 'Drag' Kirby, Kenny Buckner (drums) and Bob Wallis on trumpet.

Funny to know that Dave had forgotten these jolly recordings and it's been a pleasure for him to listen to them...

Download the tracks at Rapidshare:
"Maryland, my Maryland" (4:35) 11.00MB

https://rapidshare.com/files/1748473605/Maryland__my_Maryland.mp3 

"Big House Blues" (5:46) 13.83MB
https://rapidshare.com/files/3978886154/Big_House_Blues.mp3 
"Savoy Blues" (5:09) 12.36MB
https://rapidshare.com/files/837947095/Savoy_Blues.mp3 

no©2012 Luca Ferrari (unless you intend to make a profit. In which case, ask first) 

The same old rotten story: a 'new' Italian tribute to the TEB full of commonplaces and omissions...

It's the same old story, here, in Italy, when the so-called music journalists try to write something of significant about rock music: they are able just to write obviousness, commonplaces, repeating supposed legends taken from the same overused rotten sources... 

All in all, as they say, nothing of new under the sun, dear expert & brave Third Ear Band's fans!

This time, but just if you can read Italian, you can have a lot of assorted trite amenities - totally free!!! - at http://www.ondarock.it/rockedintorni/thirdearband.htm.
Sorry, but this is the standard we can have here, in Italy...

no©2012 Luca Ferrari (unless you intend to make a profit. In which case, ask first) 

Lyn Dobson's Four Elements.

Lyn Dobson, the last winds player of the TEB, among his countless projects, in July 2005 recorded his personal vision of the four archetipal elements - musical landscapes inspired by his eccentric  theatrical vocalist jazzy/folky/ethnic soul.

He asked me to help him to get a deal in Italy, but I had bad luck and nothing happened (but if someone's interested please contact me...).

Lyn and Ursula Smith playing on stage at Genova's Psycho Club (January 1990)

So you have now the chance to listen to three of these very fascinanting tunes and have an idea of Lyn's soundscape ideas of it. Not just the TEB's 1970 legendary four elements, of course, but a sort  of catching ragamelodic thing...

TITLE: "The Elements"

TRACKLIST:

"Air" (9:41)

"Fire" (10:29)

"Earth" (10:25)

"Water" (10:21)

Recorded in Crete on July 7th, 2005

Lyn Dobson: vocals, sitar, flutes, sax, keyboards, programming

Download it at:  
 https://soundcloud.com/teb-archive/lyn-dobsons-elements-fire
("Fire") 25.50 MB

https://rapidshare.com/files/3941370084/Lyn_Dobson_s_Elements_-_Earth.mp3 ("Earth") 25.10 MB
https://rapidshare.com/files/3360194560/Lyn_Dobson_s_Elements_-_Water.mp3 ("Water") 26.15 MB

Some recent videos with Lyn (interviewed by Mike Collins) on You Tube at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyYTlvGj3U8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceOVMjgPlfs

no©2012 Luca Ferrari (unless you intend to make a profit. In which case, ask first)

A very good review on TEB's "Music from Macbeth" by Robert Barry of "Electric Sheep Magazine" Web site.

On May 25th, 2012 Robert Barry from the site "Electric Sheep. A deviant view of cinema" writes a very good piece on TEB's "Music from Macbeth" (http://www.electricsheepmagazine.co.uk/features/2012/05/25/full-of-sound-and-fury-the-tragedy-of-macbeth/).

It's so rare to read something of new & deep about that wonderful, gloomy music...

"Full of sound and fury: the Tragedy of Macbeth

Back in the early 70s, the Third Ear Band were the festival band. Wherever there was mud, cider and an outdoor PA system, there would be Glenn Sweeney’s merry band with their strings and their hand drums, wigging out on some epic jam which somehow managed to blend together the collective folk music of half the world. Curiously, only when they were asked to provide an explicitly period soundtrack did they find it necessary to add an electronic synthesizer to their line-up. Simon House, later of Hawkwind, joined the group for the Macbeth soundtrack and left shortly after. He played a VCS-3, a keyboard-free analogue synth beloved of Brian Hodgson and Delia Derbyshire (not to mention Karlheinz Stockhausen), and designed in London by the composers Tristram Cary and Peter Zinovieff (with engineer David Cockerell).

This sudden addition of electricity to the previously acoustic group seems to suggest an understanding that the sheer macabre weirdness of Shakespeare’s play – especially as interpreted by Roman Polanski and Kenneth Tynan – demanded something other, some element of fantasy that went beyond what could be notated on manuscript paper.

For a group whose previous compositions averaged close to 10 minutes in length, the Third Ear Band are here remarkably restrained. The extended prog-rock ragas of Alchemy and its eponymous sequel are here compressed to clips of but a few seconds’ length. And for most of the play’s first act, they stick to a fairly straight medievalism, the pentatonic melismas of Paul Minns’s oboe doing a serviceable imitation of a twelfth-century shawm. The only note of something sinister – and obviously anachronistic – comes from the bass playing of Paul Buckmaster: one minute plunging into psych head music, the next evoking the drones of the tambura in Hindustani classical music. This soundtrack was Buckmaster’s only recording with the Third Ear Band, a performance turned in between arrangement work on Leonard Cohen’s Songs of Love and Hate and Miles Davis’s On the Corner.

As Shakespeare’s story grows darker and weirder, so too does the music. While Macbeth contemplates murdering Duncan, a fizzling hum of shuddering VCS-3 and scraping guitar noise underscores the famous ‘Is this a dagger I see before me?’ soliloquy. Upon the deed itself, a wild dervish of free improvisation. As the film draws towards its conclusion, with the army approaching upon the hill and mist engulfing the screen, a thick fog of dissonance drifts in likewise, seemingly emerging directly from precisely the kind of snaking modal oboe line which had once seemed to speak of happier times. As Macbeth finally meets his end, high tremolando violin merges with more VCS-3 in a pitch of piercing tinnitus.

The Third Ear Band’s music for this film has been compared to both the chamber music of György Ligeti and Masaru Sato’s soundtrack to Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (1957). The Tragedy of Macbeth has often been called the bloodiest of all Shakespeare films. With its murderous tones, forever teetering on the edge of some horror, this music may be bloodier still".
©2012 Robert Barry

The original Kurosawa's film poster

Interesting the connections with Ligeti's music and, above all, Masaru Sato's soundtrack for the Kurosawa "Throne of Blood", a 1957 transposition of the Shakespeare's tragedy.

You can watch &  listen a very significative excerpt from YouTube here: 

Also you can watch/listen to the soundtrack through some film's excerpts at the YouTube page: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=kurosawa+throne+of+blood&oq=kurosawa+throne+of+blood&aq=f&aqi=g-L3g-mL2&aql=&gs_l=youtube.3..0i19l3j0i5i19l2.1970.8920.0.9237.24.23.0.1.1.0.161.2620.5j18.23.0...0.0.WBUkEwiE0-k

no©2012 Luca Ferrari (unless you intend to make a profit. In which case, ask first)