John Klemmer - Blowin' Gold / All the Children Cried (1969) & Eruptions (1970)

Music and total creation have always been my motivation. It has been my savior and my guide. To it I owe my high and my pain. The movement of sound and colors through my mind has reached my fingers. They move with the love and desire equal to that of a newborn child's passion for Nature and Growth. I hold the faith that Art and Passion shall overcome all.

John Klemmer

The perpetual, onrushing press of seconds, minutes, and hours defines our everyday experience. The extraordinary moments are the ones that seem to take place out of time, the moments when the flow becomes suspended and activity freezes into a still-life. There are many such moments in these recordings of John Klemmer's. To experience them is to stand on a spot where the air is clear and the view stretches for miles.

Sides One and Two of this collection, originally issued in 1969 as Blowin' Gold, did a surprisingly thorough job of defining the course electric fusion music or jazz/rock would take, from 1970 to the present. The music predates Bitches Brew, the epochal Miles Davis release of 1970. Indeed, it was on this date that guitarist Pete Cosey began trying out a few of the ideas he would later utilize with Davis' band of the seventies. These historical notes are one key to the magic of the music. It is underniably music of its time: the freshness and, for want of a better world, optimism it purveys were as characteristic of the late sixties as they were almost unknown during the mid-seventies. Yet its sounds and structures, and especially its prescient melding of diverse musical elements, give it a thoeoughly contemporary sound.

"When a good friend of mine heard this music," Klemmer remarks, "he said, `it´s you, but you´re sort of playing the role of alchemist.´I guess that's true. This music represents my first use of different idioms togheter, of jazz, rock, electronics, blues, pop music. It was my first use of the echoplex, andin general I really felt like I was bursting open, finding my own thing to do."

Klemmer grew up in the wndy city, and his musical experiences there were broad. He remembers playing one of his first gigs with Muhal Richard Abrams, the stern, iconoclastic founder of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicias cooperative, in a bowling alley. "I played dixieland bands and totally free groups." he recalls. "in R&B bands and in a rock group with Jimmy Guercio (who became the producer of the the producer of the rock group Chicago). That's where this combination thing started, because I was always interested in playing so many different kinds of music."

When he recorded Blowin' Gold, Klemmer was a featured soloist with Don Ellis' adventurous big band, which opened shows for numerous rock groups, among them Janis Joplin with Big Brother and the Holding Company, and Klemmer was exposed to a lot of contemporary rock, all at once. "That was eight or nine months before I recorded the album, and it was a period of osmosis." For the date, Klemmer and his friend, pianist Richard Thompson, flew to Chicago where they worked with the Chess house rhythm section that backed Muddy Waters and other blues and R&B giants.

The next two Klemmer albums on Cadet, which have been condensed into the third and fourth sides of this set, featured musicians with whom Klemmer worked regularly in California. Many have gone on to become some of the busiest jazz, rock, and studio players on the West Coast.

The musicianship and respect of the players for one another is evident throughout the sessions. So is the heat generated by Klemmer's improvising and ideas. "I conceptualized my music and the performance of it from a gut level," he says. "It´s emotional music." In fact, Klemmer seems to have transferred the proverbial heat of Chicago jazz to supposedly cool California without losing an nth of a degree. His sound on the tenor is raw and thrusting, almost abrasive sometimes, and his technique is encyclopedic, combining an essentially Coltrane-inspired orientation with the lyricism and warmth of the Lester Young school and the vocalized shrieks and yelps of the post-Ayler avant gardist.

What's truly remarkable is Klemmer's ability to make this unusually broad vocabularyfit into a hard-rocking rhythmic context. The mixture is at its most incendiary on My Heart Sings, which combines acoustic energy saxophone with all-stops-out electronic experimentation and manages to make a great deal of subsequent jazz/rock sound pale and overly intellectual by comparison. It is at its most prophetic on Here Comes The Child, which uses the studio as musical instruments, as Herbie Hancock and Weather Report would do a few years later. "I wrote the song on a Saturday afternoon," Klemmer says. "I was looking out a window, and across the street, in a park, a children's party was going on. It was a matter of trying to put the whole thing - the music and the children - on the record."

Time stops; the children are laughing in a perpetual afternoon. That's one of the magic moments in the collection; the rest you'll enjoy finding for yourself.
By Rober Palmer

Styles:

Jazz-Rock

Fusion

Blowin' Gold 1969

Tracks:

01 - Excursion #2 (03:44)
02 - My Love Has Butterfly Wing (03:49)
03 - My Heart Sings (04:05)
04 - Hey Jude (05:50)
05 - Third Stone from the Sun (04:08)
06 - Free Soul (05:17)
07 - Children of the Earth Flames (06:34)

Line-up:

John Klemmer - tenor saxophone

Phil Upchurch - bass
Morris Jennings - drums
Pete Cosey - guitar
Richard Thompson - piano, organ


All the Children Cried 1969

Tracks:

01 - All the Children Cried (03:12)
02 - For God Whoever and Whatever It Is (04:50) x
03 - Journey's End (03:51)
04 - Moon Child (05:35) x
05 - Here Come the Child (03:08)
06 - I Whisper a Prayer for Peace (02:45)
07 - Mind Explosion (07:04) x
08 - Pulsations of a Green-Eyed Lady (03:18)
09 - Sololoquy for Tenor and Voice (01:17) x

Line-up:

John Klemmer - saxophone, wood flute & echoplex
Richard Thompson - keyboards
Art Johnson - guitar & echoplex
Wolfgang Melz - electric bass
Bob Morin - drums

Eruptions 1970

Tracks:

01 - Garden of Uranus (08:24)
02 - Summer Song (04:08)
03 - Regions of Fire (07:32)  x
04 - Rose Petals (05:32)
05 - Lady Toad (05:52)  x
06 - Mon Frere Africain (04:30)
07 - La De-Dah (04:00)
08 - Earth Emancipation (07:35) x

Line-up:

John Klemmer - saxophone, wood flute & echoplex
Mike Lang - organ & fender piano
Art Johnson - guitar & echoplex
Wolfgang Melz - electric bass
John Deniz - drums
Gary Coleman - percussion
Mark Stevens - percussion

Note: tracks marked with an x are not available.

Joe Henderson - Power to the People (1969)

The late sixties were an exciting time for jazz, although not a lucrative one. Faced with a declining market share due to the popularity of rock music, jazz musicians were forced to find an audience by pursuing new avenues in composition and instrumentation.

Joe Henderson, a much beloved player for the Blue Note label was dropped in the late sixties. Orrin Keepnews, who certainly could recognize great talent when he saw it, signed him to his newly formed Milestone label. This 1969 release finds Henderson with a near perfect rhythm section. It features imaginative compositions that easily make it a highlight of the accomplished musician's career.

Power to the People is an appropriate title for a session filled with the sense of urgency and charisma found here. Henderson took a page from the compositional methods of the Miles Davis quintet from a few years back in that many of the compositions feature the same dark corners and ambiguous chord structures of that famous group. Only "Incognito" harkens back to an earlier time in Henderson's career.

Henderson has, for the most part, abandoned the harsh tone of his earlier releases for a more smoothed over sound, giving up nothing in confidence. Herbie Hancock and Ron Carter are session musicians here, featured both on acoustic and electric instruments.

Jack DeJohnette, another master who would contribute heavily to Miles' electric period, provides skilled drumming in the background. As an added bonus, two selections feature Mike Lawrence, a promising trumpeter who died in 1983.

As part of the Keepnews Collection, the sound on this release is superb. Carter is served especially well—every note is clearly heard. Hancock's electric piano, at times both burbling in the background and providing an acid sting, is also crisp.

While signed to the Blue Note label, Henderson provided seminal releases in the accepted format. On many levels, Power to the People is more satisfying, a neglected gem that showcases an artist reaching for all that he can accomplish. 

By David Rickert in All About Jazz

Styles:

Post-Bop

Fusion

Tracks:

01 - Black Narcissus (04:52)
02 - Afro-Centric (07:05)
03 - Opus One-Point-Five (04:56)
04 - Isotope (04:56)
05 - Power To The People (08:45)
06 - Lazy Afternoon (04:36)
07 - Foresight and Afterthought (07:33)

Line-up:

Joe Henderson - tenor saxophone

Mike Lawrence - trumpet

Herbie Hancock - piano, electric piano

Ron Carter - bass instrument, electric bass

Jack DeJohnette - drum