NICE [AKA: EVERYTHING AS NICE AS MOTHER MAKES IT]

One of my all time Hammond dominated favourites, this third album by the Nice is by far their best succeeded. A superior Keith Emerson can be heard in live versions at the Fillmore East in New York of their famous Rondo (an adaptation of the Brubeck Blue Rondo A La Turk and one of the greatest renditions of a Bob Dylan song "She Belongs To Me". Under the virtuoso hands of Emerson this seemingly simple song grows out to become a brilliant progressive rock composition, one of the nicest of all Nice recordings.

The album also contains the strange but great "Azrael Revisited", a beautiful jazz piano version of the disarming and touching song by the tragic Tim Hardin, an exuberant version of the final Rondo of Lalo's Symphony Espagnol Opus 21 and last but certainly not least the great own Emerson composition For Example, a very jazzy piece with some great brass arrangements added. This last composition would appear some years later in an equally brilliant version on the fifth album of the Dutch band Ekseption.

This album is so important in the history of progressive rock, because it's a huge step forward in musical regard and it already shows us a mature and highly gifted Keith Emerson, assisted on drums by an equally great Brian Davison and by a somewhat less brilliant Lee Jackson on bass, who also acts as an even somewhat less brilliant singer. Still an album that shook progressive rock history and that should belong to you!!