ROCK • A • RAMA

ROCK . A RAMA

This month's Rock-a-ramas were written by Richard C. Walls, Richard Riegel, Rick Johnson and Michael Davis.

STAN GETZ—Another World (Columbia):: A meaty session by Getz and his current group of young Turks (plus Billy Hart, a middle-aged Turk) featuring hard blowing and catchy originals. Should obliterate any residual associations you may have linking Getz with airy bossa cotton nova candy. Highlights: Beautiful use of synthesizers for coloration and listening to Getz blow his mind via Digital Delay with Moog Echoplex on the title cut.

R.C.W.

TONIO K.-Life In The Foodchain (Full Moon)::This album is as energetic and eccentric within its given hippie-blooze limits as Root Boy Slim's was last year. This set might be approached as a sort of pouting-Californian response to the points-East ascendancy of the New Wave: the self-proclaimed Tonio K. (cf. Mann) fairly screams out his obliquely protesting lyrics, over an all-American studio band churning it out as loud and fast (but never as crude) as you always wanted it. Life in Tonio K.'s fast-foodchain necessarily involves gulping down some rather hefty chunks of legendary boogermen all the way from Capt. Beefheart to Peter Wolf to the Dooboid Bros., but try to hold off with the Heimlich maneuver until you:ve heard all nine cuts.

R.R.

SWEETBOTTOM—Angels Of The Deep (Elektra):^Strictly MOR fusion, which is the worse kind. You can't dance to it without breaking a leg and you can't listen to it without going into a coma. Except for "Shrapnel In My Ankle," which has a lively sax solo, this music doesn't deserve to exist.

R.C.W.

THE MARC TANNER BAND-No Escape (Elektra)"If you consumers just gotta have more of this sophistohippie, studiohacked Ell ! Aay rock, then this LP moves oat (marginally) better than some others of the genre. Besides, what with his suItry-Yid looks,; Mr. Tanner endearingly resembles either: a) an outtake from the Dictators' lineup, or b) R. Meltzer after hormone injections. Said LP also contains the writ-in-70's-blood Couplet of the Week: "I stay strung out on Steely/And give love cornpletely." Hey, man, don't we all!!!

R.R.

MILESTONE JAZZSTARS IN CONCERT (Milestone); SONNY ROLLINS-Taking Care of Business (Prestige):: With Big Names like Sonny Rollins, McCby Tyner and Ron Carter the Jazzstars album has to be spectacular, right? Right, (the drummer is Al Foster and altho he's a small name he's Very Good.) The record's there—so grab it, especially if you're one of the bozos who voted in the CREEM Readers' Poll's Best Jazz Album category and came up with Chuck Mangione's latest thang. The Business album is a reissue from '55 and '56 and it's witty and wise. Coltrane shows up on one cut, "Tenor Madness," and the results are two very distinct definitions of soul.

R.C.W.

ROBBEN FORD-The Inside Story (Elek tra):: Maybe it really is a perverse time we live in,, wherr studio musicians begin to consume more of those costly studio hours making their own LPs, than playing on outside artists' dates. This time around, Robben Ford collects from all the session-men whose solo debuts he played on (one hand beats off the other, in lovely-any-fimeof-year downtown L.A.), with an interminably tasteful suite of 'iectric-guitar fusination instrumentals. Ace producer Steve Cropper adds about as much raw funk as he did for the Blues Bros. Special note to consumers: this record is on Elektra's butterfly, "sensitive"-series label. (Marc Tanner's on the proven, blood-red Doors /Stooges label, anyhoo.)

R.R.

VARIOUS ARTISTS—Pointy Feet Beat (GDS)::A snappy sampler of Midwest artists that ranges from the unusually strong countryrock of Poker Flatts to impolite rockers like ol' ostrich-weinie Slink Rand and the Swingers, famed "No Enemas Please." Plus some* blues, a little tundra-drubbing and rare forged, liner notes, from the junk-wits at The Sun, P.O. Box 876, Peoria, 1L 61601.

R.J*.

JON HASSELL—Earthquake Island (Tdmato):: Fusion cruisin' for a bruisin', Afro-Latino time exposure sizzle sambas, silver-airliner phalli warm in your pants, (multi-) cunilingual sighs of pleasure, 'neath the art deco palms and moon of 1947. Gently disoriented amid the cays and lagoons of the sun countries, like I've always wanted to be. Nice.

R.R.

ORNETTE COLEMAN—The Great London Concert (Arjsta Freedom):: This is .a previously unreleased date from '65, Coleman'^, most fecund year, and it would be flawlessly fascinating if it werervt for an endless (actually 24:55) water veined chamber doodle piece on the first side called """Forms And Sounds For Wind Quintet." Anyway, on the other three sides, with bassist David Izenson and drummer Charles Moffet* Coleman bounces and swings some of the best licks he's ever recorded.

R.C.W.

SONNY ROLLINS—Taking Care of Business (Prestige):: There was a whole lot of energy goin' down in '55-'56 and not all of it was flowing through Little Richard, Elvis (P.), Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis. Sonny Rollins and Ma>^ Roach were heatin' up the hardware, too, layin' down that hard bop that did not stop until it obliterated the tepid tea 'n' toast West Coast sound. And it's still alive today.

M.D.

PETE CHIHSTLIEB/WARNE MARSH— Apogee (Warner Bros.):: Produced by Walter Becker and Ponald Fagen of Steely Dan fame, this dual tenor plus rhythm session of unregenerated bop cooks from beginning to end. Among the originals and standards is a contribution by Walt and Don themselves, and it sounds like the real thing. Recommended for the terminally hip.

R.C.W.

BERNIE WORRELL—All The Woo In The World (Arista)::P-Funk continues to divide & conquer & prosper, as yet another cog in George Clinton's funk factory makes his solo move, and spreads the boss's interchangeable, inevitable message to-yet another label. Keyboard whiz Worrell provides that familiar (but still agreeable) refunking of reality, dhbpping the honky dataspeak a bit finer, to add yet another household handle to the daily discoround vocab: "Woo". E.g.: Bob Eubanks to his nightly crop of slack-jawed newlyweds: "Which direction were your genitals pointing the last time you made 'woo'?"

R.R.

JOANNE BRACKEEN-Tring-A-Ling (Choice):: Brackeen won the Best Honky Chick Wearing Glasses and Playing Jazz Piano award in Toot magazine, and she deserved both votes she got. This is really a firne album but the music (acoustic modern mainstream impressionistic type jazz with avant-gare inclinations)and the label are so obscure that it's depressing to think just how fine.it is.

R.C.W.

BIGHORN (Columbia):: What fans of Tull and Styx and Yes (still) call "progressive rock", complete with a rather fey Frank Burns-lookalike on keyboards. Memo to CBS: How cum this group's not on yer Caribou label? Think about it. Really!

R.R.

JACKIE MCLEAN—Hipnosis (Blue Note):: In 1963 alto saxist McLean recorded Let Freedom Ring, a personal statement of ground breaking and certainly one of the most passionate jazz records ever released. Tho praised in its (time, Freedom seems largely forgotten now. The two previously unreleased sets'here were recorded in '62 and '67 and amount to a before and after portrait. The first is a hard bop session with McLean teething at the bit while the second is a tempered exploration of the passionate freedom McLean staked out. McLean will probably remain under rated—his struggles can be uncomfortable to hear, lacking the symmetry of beauty or the confidence associated with the -avant-garde.

R.C.W.

HORSLIPS—The Man Who Built America (DJM)::A surprisingly good record, considering that it's a concept album about early Irish immigration to the United States. Unfortunately, the Irish receive a lot of negative mediaexposure here in the States, not so much for their current civil strife, as from generations' of popular-but-misleading Irish-American stereotypes, beginning with Bing Crosby, and culminating in those broguemired dumbbells on Ryan's Hope, who make Irishness appear to be the most disgusting ethnic affiliation possible. It's become too easy to forget that the Irish came from a real ♦European country, and that they functioned as the opp/essed blacks ®F their time, in tum-of-the-century America. The allIrish Horslips help recapture the tarnished vitality of those origins here, with their nicely melodic, unpretentious brand of celt 'n' roll.

S R.R.

BRAND X—Masques (Passport Records):: Brand X seems to have mastered every, fusion cliche' there is—the rapid unison lines, the quick and frequent tempo changes, the spacey guitar and keyboard combinations, etc.—and their last album was a real turkey. But this time out (their fourth), the cliche's are less evident and the group's specialty, composition, is given fuller range. Still, if they'd just add a horn, they probably wouldn't sound so cold.

R.C.W,