A beautiful sixties Greek soundtrack: Hellespontus - Stavros Xarcharkos (1966)

This is a classy set of original Greek folk music from 1966 composed by Stavros Xarcharkos. The dominant presence of the bouzouki on most tracks lends the album a strong Greek, traditional feel, but there is a welcome addition of unorthodox tones for this style of music such as electric guitar and glockenspiel. As the liner notes say, Xarcharkos has a ‘talent for blending unusual instrumentation with the warm melancholy of beautiful songs’. There’s a lot of range here, from slow, spooky bazouki numbers such as Horos Tou Sakaina - which when I first heard it, I was sure was the source material for Secret Chief’s 3’s Ship Of Fools* - to fast, odd-metred folk dances like Fos Tis Avgis and Ipomoni.

This LP was originally released in 1966, but was reissued in 1972 when one of the tunes was appropriated as the theme song to the successful BBC drama series The Lotus Eaters. It is from this reissue that this rip was made, which I was fortunate enough to find at the Phillip Island Vinnies Store.

*It's probably not.

Label: EMI

Released: Originally 1966, this reissue sometime after 1972.

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Moog-tinged jazz-funk from the King of Jingles: Vichyssoise - Bruce Clarke & Maryan Kenyon (1973)

Bruce Clarke was an Australian jazz guitarist, composer and founder of legendary label Cumquat Records. He was one of those diverse hired-guns of the Australian scene, active from the late fifties until the seventies when he started teaching. In 1957 he set up The Jingle Workshop, a studio and production company responsible for countless pieces of television music and soundtracks.

On this record Bruce teams up with Maryan Kenyon, a classical pianist from the Melbourne Conservatorium who worked at The Jingle Workshop. Bruce was a big fan of the Moog synth and Maryan ‘used her spare time to learn and master the equipment at hand’, so the liner notes inform us. ‘Maryan is not just a very pretty face’.

The notes, after having reassured us that the classically trained pianist featured on the album is good-looking (what about Bruce?), mostly wax lyrical about how unusual and eclectic this album is; a combination of bold, unique flavours, just like vichyssoise - a vegetable based French soup - which helps to explain why Clarke and Kenyon are posing in front of a giant leek on the cover. There is a wonderful and unexpected array of sounds to be found on this disc, mainly from the various Moogs and other electronics featuring in most songs. 

The feel of the album is dominated by white-Australian jazz funk with a hint of exotica, exemplified by the brilliant Djerba. Djerba opens with a slow, middle-eastern section scored by tom drums and a back and forth interplay between Clarke’s classical guitar and Kenyon’s wah-wah synth. The song then segues into an upbeat funk riff, allowing Kenyon some space to noodle around a bit with the synth and for Clarke to bring on some fuzz guitar.

Vichyssoise is a consistently good listen throughout due to well-chosen songs (about half originals by Clarke or Kenyon, the rest covers) and the extremely high quality of playing from the two stars and their band. Also, the very well-executed and constant presence of Moog and early synths on the tracks always keeps me entertained, setting it apart from other albums of it’s oeuvre.

Postscript: As inexplicable as it sounds, Howard Moon and Vince Noir appear to be members of Bruce and Maryan's band. Howard has a well documented love of jazz, but I'm surprised to see Vince involved. I'm pretty sure this proves the existence of parallel fiction realities.

Label: Cumquat

Released: 1973
Players: Bruce Clarke - composer/arranger/conductor, classic and electric guitars, Fender bass, Moog synthesiser, vocals
Maryan Kenyon - composer/arranger, Fender-Rhodes, acoustic pianos, harpsichord, Moog synthesiser, vocals
Brian Czempinski - percussion and special effects
Ted White - woodwinds (sax)
Llloyd Knapp - woodwinds
Barry Veith - woodwinds
Fred Hosking - woodwinds
Ron Anderson - woodwinds
Bill Harrower - woodwinds
Eddie Oxley - woodwinds
Keith Stirling - trumpets and/or flugelhorns
Bruce Gardiner - trumpets and/or flugelhorns
Reg Walsh - trumpets and/or flugelhorns
John Hughes - trumpets and/or flugelhorns
Ron Webb - trumpets and/or flugelhorns
Orme Stewart - trombones
Clive Webber - trombones
Jack Glenn - trombones
Col Williams - trombones
John Kennedy - cello
Judy Grieve - cor anglais
Maurice Sheldon - tuba

Strings uncredited.

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Braddock cigarettes toe-tappingly tackle women's lib: The Braddock Way of Seeing Things - Larry King (197?)

More cigarette advertising songs! This is a promotional 7" I found at the always awesome 3MBS record fair. Braddock are a brand of cigarettes that no longer exist, but who were clearly aiming for a very manly, conservative image with this campaign. I found it very difficult to get any details about this record at all until I found the website of what turned out to be the producer: Brian King. There are a lot of Brian Kings out there, and it wasn't until he replied that I knew he was the right man. Here is an excerpt of his email:

For about 10 years starting in the 70's I was in partnership with Larry King (no relation). We had a company which produced advertising jingles and film music.

When "Braddock" came our way it was right in the middle of the "Women's Lib" movement and the brief was to create a campaign which celebrated the differences between men and women. Larry King was a good looking guy, kind of like the "Marlborough Man" and as well as our company producing the music Larry also got the gig as "The Braddock Man". This involved a short live tour to Melbourne which was the place they decided to test market the brand. The slogan for the campaign was "Braddock....Not Mild".

It was all good fun but to this day I've still never smoked a cigarette!

I emailed Brian back with a few follow-up questions - I was quite curious as to whether there were any photos of 'The Braddock Man', for example - but he didn't reply.

There are eight tracks on this record with lyrically consistent themes of women dressing differently to how they used to, bureaucracy and red tape making a man's life difficult and very little mention of tobacco or cigarettes - although every composition ends with Braddock's aforementioned tagline, 'Braddock…not mild'. As Brian alludes to, this was a pitch aimed at the kind of blokes who were threatened or bewildered by the womens' rights movement and there's an amusing lack of subtlety in the lyrics which pretty much all boil down to 'Everything is different to how it used to be (so smoke our cigarettes)'.



Label: Private press
Released: 197?
Players: Larry King - vocals

Brian King - producer

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Australian Geographonic - tracks from Pat Aulton, Philip Merifield and Barry Hall At The Conn Organ.

The Place I Want To Be - Pat Aulton (1980). Pat Aulton is quite a celebrated musician and producer who was particularly successful in the sixties and seventies, producing hit records for people such as Normie Rowe. I was familiar with Aulton through a fantastic library track called Barrier Reef that he contributed to Standard Music Library ESL 126 alongside John Sangster and Sven Libaek. On The Place I Want To Be he is front of the microphone and singing this somewhat awkward paean to Great Eastland - a chunk of northern New South Wales and south Queensland. Aulton forges ahead with gusto, even (almost) selling artless lines like, ‘We’ve got people peanut picking up in Kingaroy’ or ‘All through the inland and right along the coast, when you look at people’s faces, you can almost see them boast’. I suspect this was the theme song for the regional television network Great Eastland Television as they commissioned the track and the term ‘Great Eastland’ isn’t widely used in a geographical sense. The B-side, Country Nights fares no better lyrically but has some lovely production touches.

It’s Another World - Phillip Merifield (198?). It’s Another World is actually the B-side of this single, but I like it better than the A, so here it is. This is another promotional single either for the Gippsland region in general, or a business called ‘Lakeland Wonderland’ in Lakes Entrance, that rare thing that has basically zero Google presence, so I haven’t the faintest idea. Anyway, the song itself is in the same ‘list as many towns as you can’ school of songwriting as The Place I Want To Be, but feels a little bit more natural. I haven’t found any information at all about Merifield, but the single was produced by John Wallis, a folk muso who has been active since the eighties and is still playing today. (And, to illustrate the incestuousness of the Australian music scene, on his 1984 LP A Singer Of The Bush he was joined on keyboards by Ian Eccles-Smith, whose progressive releases I have previously showcased on Urban Bowerbird.)

The Lights Of Adelaide - Barry Hall At The Conn Organ (1969). Barry Hall is a bit of a star organ player who released a number of LPs in the sixties and seventies and at 77 years old still has new CDs for sale on his website today. This track is off his Choose Your Own LP which was the name of Barry’s radio show on Adelaide’s 5DN. On this show, Barry would ‘spin records, give cheerio calls to listeners, handle competitions and play the organ’. Little wonder that Barry remained a ‘firm favourite with housewives over the years’. One competition that 5DN held in 1968 was an Australia wide songwriting contest for a song about Adelaide. The winner, The Lights Of Adelaide written by Mr. Cliff Johns of Belair, is given Barry’s organ-driven treatment with accompaniment from Kevin Roper on drums and Roy Wooding on guitar. Sure, it’s a daggy and antiquated tune (have you ever been to Adelaide?) but it’s pretty charming and the addition of live guitar lifts it above the general standard of op-shop organ music. All in all, it perfectly sums up Adelaide, or ‘Radelaide’ as it is regularly, sarcastically referred to by Melbournians and Sydneysiders alike.

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Maori folk pop with a hint of Hawaii: The Fabulous Howard Morrison Quartet (1960)

Although the fabulous Howard Morrison and his quartet were all New Zealanders playing traditional Kiwi songs, there’s a definite Hawaiian feel to this four-track EP. It seems obvious enough why they would take this stylistic route; Hawaiian music was huge in the sixties, these fellow denizens of the Pacific must have felt a kinship with its culture, and why not take advantage of a musical trend while you can? 

The songs on the EP all showcase the strong multi-part harmonies of the fabulous quartet and are all sung in their native Maori tongue. My favourite is the upbeat closing track, Haere Haere Ra E Hine, which features some sweet, reverby sixties guitar playing.

Label: La Gloria

Released: 1960

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Our man of many trumpets: John Robertson and his Multi Trumpets – John Robertson (196?)

John Robertson was a classically trained trumpeter, originally from New Zealand, who emigrated to Australia in the fifties or sixties. Despite a strong reputation as an orchestral player, he also cut a few popular LPs such as this exotica/Latin record from the mid-sixties. The reference to ‘multi trumpets’ seems to simply refer to Robertson using multi-tracking of trumpet lines and accompanying himself on most tracks – fairly standard practice, I would have thought, but I guess you’ve got market your instrumental trumpet LP somehow.

Most of the information I’ve been able to find about Robertson has been from a conversation on a trumpet forum from 2005. They’ve got some solid information about Robertson and some good stories such as this one about the musicians who were playing at Sydney’s famous Trocadero jazz venue: One of their numbers had each musician playing some novelty trick... Robbo's gimmick was to hold a high C for 16 bars revolving the trumpet on his lips, while the band played chords underneath. Apparently all the Sydney musicians would crowd in to see him do this act - couldn't believe the lack of mouthpiece pressure. And [trumpeter] George Dobson commented later about these days saying each night he (still seated) would be covered in 'a fine spray of spittle as Robbie (standing) went into act'!

Anyway, John Robertson and his Multi Trumpets is a fine set of instrumental standards played with great skill by Robertson and arranged beautifully by Thomas Tycho. The first track to really make an impression on me was Sugar Plum Cha-cha, an adaptation of Tchaikovsky’s piece of (more or less) the same name. Yes, it’s twee as fuck, but the bass and percussion is swinging and it’s ultimately quite a well executed interpretation.



Label: RCA
Released: 196?
Players: John Robertson: Trumpet and flugelhorn
Thomas Tycho: Musical director and arranger
Don Andrews: Guitar soloist on La Spagnola

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Bach + koto and shakuhachi + jazz trio = J.S. Bach Is Alive And Well And Doing His Thing On The Koto – Tadao Sawai et al (1971)

This rather unusual and improbably named LP marks the moment that I realised I had been neglecting the ‘classical’ bins at the record fairs. I’m not a huge fan of Bach – he’s a bit too chromatic and conventional for my tastes – but I couldn’t go past an album of his music being interpreted by traditional Japanese instrumentation supported by a jazz rhythm section.

How/why did this get made? God only knows, but I suspect that it was conceived and produced by the Japanese players who thought it would be an interesting musical exercise but that it then later made its way into the hands of an American label who thought that the only way to market such a chimera would be with a wacky angle and silly record cover. (As you can see, the cover depicts a gentleman in full baroque regalia whimsically nursing a koto in a traditional Japanese room. It's basically a direct appropriation of the cover concept for Switched On Bach.) The liner notes continue this light-hearted theme with a faux interview with Bach himself who muses on his works, gives his approval to this new interpretation of his music and cracks a few very corny gags. The LP appears to have been released in an earlier incarnation in 1969 with the (slightly) less silly title “A New Sound From The Japanese Bach Scene”.

Despite the label trying to sell this set off as a bit of a joke, the music itself is very well produced and skilfully played. The fusion of the disparate elements of Bach, Japanese traditional and jazz works seamlessly and it’s actually a very congruent listen overall.

Label: RCA

Released: 1971 (Original release 1969)

Players: Tadao Sawai - first koto

Kazue Sawai - second koto

Hozan Yamamoto - shakuhachi

Sadanori Nakamure - guitar

Tatsuro Takimoto - bass

Takeshi Inomata - drums

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