SOLSTICE

Well it absolutely fantastic to see Ralph Towner added to Progressive Archives. An important ECM artist for mostly minimalist jazz instrumentals, alongside the likes of Jan Garbarek and Eberhard Weber or even keyboardist Keith Jarrett.

What needs to be said about Solstice? An absolutely stunning aural tapestry of sound encompassing all the characteristics one would feel or find with Winter, distant sun, weak sunlight, falling leaves or still frozen lakes and driven snow. It's depiction of this mood is so accurately kicked off with the splendid Oceanus. Towner's 12 string guitar is simply beautiful as is Garbarek's flute. A major highlight throughout Solstice is Eberhard Weber's bass and cello playing too. The musicianship holds this album together extremely well and being under the ECM banner/or progressive sound one can tell on listening and appreciating it why the music does not age at all. Anyway "Oceanus" take the listener on a swirling 11 minute ride before the alien song called ' Visitation' steps in. Perhaps one of the few songs that really does send shivers down the spine when depicting the possibilities of alien life. The most unusual track on the album but not unpleasant, reminds the reviewer morelike of amoeba and still pond life in midst of Winter. ' Drifting Petals" closes side one and is a beautiful seven minute passage and in the reviewers opinion the most accessible song on Solstice. Side two follows with ' Nimbus' which is an extremely clever piece of music with quirky time signatures as Weber and Towner interchange expertly between cello, bass and 12 string. Winter Solstice is next and here and the next few songs is where Garbarek seems to have more license to play out the album with the exception of Piscean Dance.

In summary this album would have received a fiver star rating had the album not dissipated so readily after Winter Solstice. It is an exceptional work that will require repeated listens by people new to RT before fully appreciating how important this work is.Four and a half stars.

This album is one of cornerstone of European modern jazz. Excellent expressionist sound pictures painted by Towner's guitar, ECM founder Eberhard's bass, great jazz drummer Jon Hristensen and Nordic trumpet genius Jan Garbarek just build all the basis for what will be named "ECM sound" later.

Cool, aerial, melancholic, but Nordic- not too much sensitive, compositions, showed that improv jazz music could be not only interesting, but beautiful as well. Possibly, the best Towner work to time, at the same time is one of the best trumpeter's Jan Garbarek work as well! It is more than enough to name this album excellent.

Album's opener - 10 minutes long "Ocean" shows to listener all he must to know about this album. If you like Nordic jazz, you will love this song as well. After you heard the opener, you are ready to listen all the album. Every composition is excellent, but you know now what to wait.

Music fluctuates between folksy jazz improvs and acoustic fusion, being free and beautiful at the same time. Rare combination of accessibility and complexity.

If you're newbie to Ralph Towner, Jan Garbarek, or ECM sound in whole, just start there. Possibly you will find your new interest in music.

My rating is 4+.

On Solstice, Ralph Towner presents a style of fusion which sometimes musters the volcanic fury of the Mahavishnu Orchestra, but just as often explores more downbeat and melancholy territory than fusion usually deals with. As a genre whose fans prize fast, technical playing, fusion doesn't often do "quiet", but Towner manages to pull it off brilliantly here, helping to establish the basis of the distinctive ECM sound along the way. And amazingly enough, it's mostly improvised too! Towner's Northern European backing band prove to be more than capable of supporting Towner's vision, and whilst the album might not be one of the more famous products of the fusion era, it's certainly one of the more original ones.

I'm biased, but I'll try to make it helpful. Maybe my Towner story will offer a new listener a little glimpse of what the impact of his music can be. For starters, any prog lover with an open mind, should be fascinated - not put off dismissive nor intimidated - by what is unique about him and his music.

Towner should be understood as an innovative composer-performer who transcends and sidesteps ANY genre. He is classifiable as a world/jazz/classical/improvisatory musician playing a classical guitar with classical technique, with lyrical structures, unique chord voicing (one measure, and there is no mistaking him or any musician who has ever made a recording), virtuoso technique, creative mix of acoustic, electric, and esoteric instruments, and both free time and strangely grooving, shifting, odd-meter rhythms, with and without percussion. Though his percussionists are among the most creative you will ever hear (Jon Christensen is a Norwegian legend of artful, restrained-yet-passionate drumming). This ain't progressive rock, but it hits all the marks a prog-lover is likely to require, except the bombast of some prog artists.

In college, 1983, I was a classic prog-lover, feeling sad because I was sure I had heard it all. Genesis first, Yes, Gentle Giant, sometimes ELP, plus Canterbury, RIO, as much obscure and esoteric stuff as I could find which felt like it had heart, edge, and substance. There was, I believed, no new progressive rock, nor anything to do for me what Zeppelin and The Beatles did. This day offered the two musical paths, unexpected, which would lead me to still-enriching and thrilling musical worlds which wind together and apart, but never failing to offer thrills and creative nourishment. Add to this the discovery, around 2005, that lots of good and great prog had begun to grow out of a renaissance of devotion to its sound and values a number of years earlier, while I had stopped paying attention: Echolyn, Flower Kings, Anglagard, Anekdoten, Big Big Train, etc. That's for another review.

There was a little record store on campus. On lunch break, I sleep-walked in and started my habitual rifling-through the stacks, not expecting anything. First, I came upon the orange cover of Miles Smiles. I remembered that my Dad - a plainly dressed, mild- mannered-looking professor/civil servant type who was both far more passionate, volatile, and open-minded yet opinionated than he seemed, especially about music, had an encyclopedic sensitivity to classical music had an iffy but sometimes positive attitude toward jazz. I was sure it wouldn't suck, and I put aside any prejudices about what I thought "jazz" was...and there was the beginning of half of the twofold path.

I bought Miles Smiles, and one piece of significance of that album, among several, was that it introduced me to musicians who led to other musicians - like DeJohnette thru Tony Williams, Dave Holland and Kenny Wheeler (the latter on Bruford's first album, the former name-dropped as the bassist he WANTED on One of a Kind) through my new love for acoustic bass and trumpets, Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter leading to Joni Mitchell (a truly, massively progressive musician, if you didn't know). Wheeler, DeJohnette, and Holland were also mainstays of the ECM music-world, so there is one way the paths converge and diverge.

But that same day, the other record I found was Solstice....the sheer black cover with the abstracted trees, ice blue, set in a stark square against all black, simple lettering organized in perfect, simple geometry, was tantalizing, and would always be associated with the pristine qualities of ECM music, whether minimalist chamber-jazz free or fiery, or classical re-framings, or unclassifiable synthesis of elements from the bigger universe. I was bored, and the packaging and player-credits, they were interesting to start with. And, that sound-quality....nothing like it. ECM is a musical world, not a label or a company.

I played Solstice before the Miles Davis. That moment was just a notch below losing my virginity. No idea what to expect. Jaw dropped. Thought was: "this is my music. I've been waiting for this". Twelve-string and classical guitar, with sax and flute, plucked, bowed, and multi-tracked electric cello and five string bass, plus drums? Musicians from three different cultures?

On goes Oceanus. Resembles nothing. Hit my Prog Receptors, but sounded nothing like any prog I knew of. Open, shimmering twelve-string chords - chords I'd never heard before, at least not that way. In comes a tapestry of smoothly skittering, free-swinging ride cymbal (Jon's legendary 22-inch Turkish-Z), with expository snare and accenting bass drum....not what the uninitiated thinks of as jazz, but swinging, never repeating, and always implying a pulse. I'd never heard this kind of free-jazz-groove before. Multi- tracked swell of bowed electric cello-bass - tenor sax like a voice from the sky. Not bebop. No free-blowing....but clearly based on a few strange but beautiful harmonic transitions, about which the players have a heated discussion, which I got to listen in upon. Think I'm being too dramatic? Read other descriptions of this tune, this album, online, here on PA.

Lots of highlights...huge variety. The alien meeting of "Visitation". Free-funk dialogue of drums and 12-string...just a musical event, comes and goes; feels like walking in on the middle of two guys telling each other inside jokes, and then they spot you, and leave. Nimbus: gorgeous, stunning melody, intro'd on guitar, joined and flute, building tension, repeated, tension dropping back, until the whole group comes in, flute shifting to wailing sax, drums dancing around a 6/8 time interspersed with dramatic cadences in 3 and 4, half-time, double time. Weber getting sounds you never heard of - resembling both fretless bass, orchestral cello and bass fiddle - Jaco playing ambient, sometimes with a bow, while meditating on Bartok. Back to flute. There's more...no point in describing everything you're likely to experience in your own way.

This might open a new door for you, as it did for me. Ralph Towner is my favorite musician, period. He says things no one else says, in a language you never learned, understand intuitively, but would need decades to analyze for both content and aesthetics. He improvises fluently in chords no one else would use, alternating with finger-style virtuoso runs, harmonics, internal counterpoint, sometimes melodic and sometimes otherworldly and dissonant. He says it on two kinds of guitar, world-class piano playing, trumpet and French horn, and synthesizer (sounds strange for this singular acoustic voice to have been drawn to a Prophet 5 synth ( little later in his career, solo and with Oregon), but if you listen carefully, you'll hear it is an extension of his voice, his ideas about both substance and atmosphere). Towner also plays jazz standards, in a beautiful way....but with that unmistakable voice.

Eberhard Weber, now permanently retired due to a stroke (but creative enough to have chosen his favorite live bass solos and turning them into GOOD compositions opened up by Garbarek and others - see John Kelman's review of "Resume" on All About Jazz), made a point of sounding like no other bassist, ever. His own "Colours of Chloe" was, quietly, the inauguration of a whole new kind of jazz-prog-classical synthesis, which changed the ears and the stylistic choices of creative musicians and listeners around the world. A whole separate river of fusion.

Garbarek has moved through every style from free, Ayler-Coltrane blowing, to ruminative Scandinavian-folk-inspired compositions - which have disappointed many fans of his more open playing, but which, too, are their own aesthetic - and Garbarek's tone and harmonic ideas have created a whole-'nuther aesthetic for the sax, apart from bebop, hard-bop, free, or fusion.....it is its own thing, and many younger saxophonists have taken up that basic idea, no longer sounding like Parker, Rollins, Coleman, Shorter, or 'Trane devotees.

Christensen, too, cannot be mistaken for anyone else....his is a true voice, and philosophy, of time and rhythm. He swings fine, burns nicely, but has no ego at all. Time could be, as he once said, walking into a club on Tuesday, hitting the ride, and going back next Tuesday, and hitting it again. Drum-sounds are sounds, and colors, and ideas, and time - time not always being regular, or slow, or fast, like water isn't, and sometimes they are what we think of as familiar drumming. You might not have heard of him, but a large minority of creative drummers cite him as an influence or inspiration.

So, end of essay. This album was the beginning of my adult musical life. I can listen to Towner any time, any aspect of what he does. He never fails me. The connections between him, and the other three, and hundreds of other great and diverse players from around the world, in every style, have created a whole world of music options. Really progressive, but with different ingredients and references. And Genesis and Yes and the rest are still there, part of my diet. But please, start with Solstice, listen carefully, a few times at least, and then connect the dots to other albums, artists. Lots of us have had this "conversion".