Skip to main content

A Bowl of Soul

This is a 1970 UK re-issue, on the short-lived Valiant label, of an album recorded in '66 and released in '67. The original US pressings had a cartoon-style cover design depicting a cereal box and a bowlful of something with a spoon in it. Someone by the name of Paul May is credited with the design featuring the woman's torso. The music is earthy soul-jazz, expertly led by Holmes' Hammond organ.

It's too bad the cover designer got credited for his work, but the musicians - Holmes excepted - did not: they did a great job, especially whoever was on the electric guitar. Holmes is on fine form too: I particularly like the range of sounds he coaxes from the keyboard in the slowly simmering 'How Long How Long Blues'. The producer, who did get a mention, was Nick Venet: apparently he was also in the control room (according to wikipedia) for some of the early Beach Boys singles: 'Surfin' Safari', etc. 

Also thanks to wikipedia, I gather that the band backing Holmes on this record were Onzy Matthews' orchestra: but I've yet to find any further particulars about the players. In any case, only a few of the tracks got the full big-band treatment: the others, such as the eponymous opener, sound like they featured only a quartet of organ, guitar, bass & drums. There's nothing groundbreaking here, but it's all eminently enjoyable entertainment.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

All Wrapped Up

Here's another of the compilation cassettes I bought this summer, having taken home a Denon twin-deck hi-fi cassette player from the local charity shop. All Wrapped Up is a 1983 compilation of singles by The Undertones, with Side One filled with A-sides, and B-sides on Side Two. A cassette must be the least desirable medium for such an arrangement, with a long rewind required if one just wants to hear the hits repeatedly. The Undertones were unapologetically provincial and anti-fashionable, with their songs sharply-written slices of life that pointedly avoided any mention of politics, or of the then-continuing violence in their native Derry. My favourite tracks are the obvious choices: 'Teenage Kicks', 'Jimmy Jimmy', 'Here Comes the Summer', 'My Perfect Cousin' & 'Wednesday Week'. Their later singles showed increased sophistication but lack the some of the straightforward charm of their earlier work. The B-sides, not unexpectedly, are mo...

Complete String Quartets

While the string quartets of Nikolai Yakovievich Myaskovsky (1881-1950) were all published in the Soviet era, a few of them had pre-revolutionary origins. Two quartets he wrote in 1911 and '09 while a conservatory student re-surfaced some twenty years later designated as Quartets Nos. 3 and 4.  An even earlier "schoolboy" piece was later re-worked more radically as Quartet No. 10, premiered in 1945. Myaskovsky partook of an ample share of the turmoil and tragedy of his times: he was wounded and shell-shocked after service on the front line in World War I, and his father, who had been a high-ranking military engineer, was brutally murdered by a revolutionary mob. Despite that, his music, even at its most sombre, hasn't the black bile or biting sarcasm of Shostakovich's, or of his friend Prokofiev's. Of the works collected here, in excellent early '80s performances by the Taneyev Quartet, only Quartet No. 1 has any significantly metallic tang of early S...

Onslow

George Onslow was an odd-man-out among 19th-century French composers. Born into wealth and privilege, the grandson of an English Earl, he had no need to follow the operatic gravy train, with string quartets (of which he wrote 36) and string quintets (there are another 32 of those) forming the bulk of his compositional output. The present disc contains his 28th, 29th and 30th quartets, in compelling performances by the Quatuor Diotima. These quartets were written toward the end of a prolifically-creative period for Onslow in the years 1829-35. Viviane Niaux, in her informative booklet notes, ascribes this to the composer's having heard performances of two of Beethoven's late quartets for the first time in 1828, at their Paris première. Like many of his contemporaries, Onslow was at once "fascinated and disconcerted", and, although he considered them "extravagant", they seem to have been powerfully inspirational. A further spur to creativity may have been his ...