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| SOFT MACHINE - Live at the Baked Potato (2019, Los Angeles) (MoonJune new release) JOHN ETHERIDGE - guitar THEO TRAVIS - sax, flute, Fender Rhodes electric piano ROY BABBINGTON - bass guitar JOHN MARSHALL - drums Recorded live at The Baked Potato, February 1st, 2020, during the Soft Machine's 50th Anniversary World Tour 2019/2020. Produced by Theo Travis. Co-produced by Soft Machine. Executive producer Leonardo Pavkovic. Contains several Soft Machine classics from 70s: 'Out-Bloody-Rageous', 'Hazard Profile', 'Kings And Queens', 'The Tale Of Taliesin', 'The Man Who Waved At Trains'; in addition to new tunes from 'Hidden Details' album (2018). Liner notes by KEN KUBERNIK (Los Angeles, May 2020) Let's begin this story in the middle: Leonardo Pavkovic (aka "Nardini") and I had somehow bamboozled some very enthusiastic Japanese record executives into bankrolling a reunion of Soft Machine which we dubbed "Soft Works" (owing to the polyhedron challenges of clearing the name we decided to just go with a gentle tweak). We booked a studio in London, corralled four representative members – Elton Dean, Allan Holdsworth, Hugh Hopper, John Marshall – and set off on our boy's own adventure. Every morning Hugh Hopper would meet me at my modest lodgings, play me tapes from the previous day's session, then escort me to the studio, lolling along the yellow brick Portobello Road, that femoral artery of Swinging London's halcyon days. I could scarcely contain my excitement, incredulous that musicians I'd revered as an impressionable West Coast teen in the early '70s entrusted me to help them reach another musical plateau. I've always believed that life was at best a series of small victories, but this bordered on holding a winning lottery ticket. Things were going swimmingly well; all that remained was for Mr. Holdsworth to lay down some guitar overdubs and we'd be done. The label was besotted, Leonardo was already imagining a legion of concert bookings, and I stood stoic and proud, like a victory column in Trafalgar Square. If only it had ended there. What followed was more mishegass than a season's worth of "Curb Your Enthusiasms". What is it about Yorkshire geezers who insist on snatching defeat from the jaws of victory? The album we produced, Abracadabra, remains a source of great pride, a testament to perseverance. It holds its own against the more prized, dog-eared titles in the Softs library. What is it, exactly, that distinguishes this singular band of brothers (nephews and cousins) whose Sisyphean travails have always been met with characteristic British sangfroid, the hearty good cheer accompanying a round of pints at the local pub. It was bred in the bone, in Robert Wyatt's childhood home – Wellington House – where a self-selected cabal of Bolshie cultural miscreants plotted while the Goon Show crackled on the radio, aided and abetted by Monk and Miles, Coltrane and Motown, the Beatles, the Beats (and the Everly Brothers, Hugh reminded me). Marinating in the acid-addled '60s, Soft Machine married a kind of bold amateurism with an antic professionalism that compelled the listener's undivided attention. In time they ripened into the hippest outfit in the underground, masquerading as a trio, quartet, quintet, septet (my favorite) and any other configuration that sustained their madcap revelry. I first met Leonardo twenty years ago in a circumstance of pure serendipity. We were attending a loosely-arranged "Prog" conference, where guys were debating whether Van Der Graaf lost its way after Nic Potter left. (And my friends wondered why I shifted my allegiance to jazz, another blood sport.) Nardini was holding court about the sonic apocalypse that was Mike Ratledge in full flight. Now that, I could hang with! We initiated our friendship over food court pizza and the ecclesiastical strains of the fuzz organ. In the years that followed, the kernel of MoonJune grew into a, well, if not a sheltering oak, then certainly a resilient willow. I've tagged along when it made sense. Soft Machine "Legacy" soldiered on under Leonardo's steadfast oversight, carrying the mantle of their storied history to old and new audiences. (Check out their 2012 performance at the Frankfurt Jazz Festival 2012 with special guest, Keith Tippett – a gig supreme!) And so here we are, in a world as only Rod Serling could imagine. But now there's a soundtrack worthy of this magically-disordered moment. Soft Machine (unabridged) rides again, a valiant reminder of when giants bestrode the earth (it was all of 17 months ago but it seems like the Pleistocene given our manic circumstances). The Baked Potato, a cozy shoe box of a performance space on Ventura Blvd., a frisbee toss from Universal City, graciously hosted the Softs return to L.A., their first since their mythic appearance at the slightly more capacious Hollywood Bowl on September 14, 1968, opening for Jimi Hendrix. Yeah... about bloody time. Every note they played over their two-night engagement was revelatory. No, there wasn't Ratledge's banshee wail or Hugh's mighty buzz bomb bass, or Elton's serpentine saxello. Instead, there were these two marvelous senators, John Marshall and Roy Babbington, connecting decades of time and space with their ineffable English approach to rocking a pocket, the whip crack of the snare, the looping, "felt" presence of the bass lines. It's that hint of the oblique that elevates their take on (dreadful word alert) fusion, where most everyone else sounds, however dexterous, like key-punch operators. I guess you had to survive a volley of V-2 rockets to really lay down that groove. John Etheridge, a consummate gentleman, played with the savvy that accrues from a lifetime of experience while retaining a fan's passion. Yes, he kvetches like all guitarists about his rig acting up or not living up to his own expectations (though no one stuck himself with pins quite like Allan Holdsworth). But that's just the prerogative of a perfectionist settling for the merely exquisite. Theo Travis, the new kid, painted with a deft, lightly-held brush, never too much or too little, an aristocrat's sense of proportion. I once made the smart-ass observation that if you wanted to end a relationship, just spin Third and watch the object of your disaffection race for the exit. I've matured (I hope) into the more thoughtful belief that Soft Machine's entire body of work (triple) echoes Andrew Loog Oldham's appraisal of his then musical charges, the Rolling Stones, when he opined that they were more than a group, but a way of life. The Soft approach is not intended to accommodate everyone, just those who delight in the play of ideas rather than notes, who embrace the counterpoint between structure and improvisation, who embrace the slip and slid of mastery in motion. I was there and now so are you. write your comments about the article :: © 2020 Jazz News :: home page |