John Sangster - "Australia and all that Jazz" Vol 1 (1971)

"Rain"


"man, the destroyer"

AUSTRALIAN JAZZ - THE LIBRARY CONNECTION #3

Some jazz, some bossa rhythms, and some easy-listening-musique-concrète soundtrack all in the one package. What a bargain!

John Sangster's fascinating soundtrack album for a series of nature documentaries is buried behind one of the one of the worst, most generic titles of all time - not to mention the skanky record cover, which doesn't even have his name on it - but that was the lot of the commissioned library/soundtrack composer in 1970s Australia.

On the upside, that's probably a factor that allowed me to grab it for $3 at a street market a few months back, rather than having to pay the hundreds of dollars that some of his albums go for. Anyway, it's something of a buried treasure that we'll try and dig up today.


John Sangster was a vibraphonist, percussionist and composer who started out in fairly straight-ahead jazz groups as a cornettist, releasing two albums in the late 1940s. During the 1960s he developed an interest in the avant garde and then broadened his listening and composing to latin and other musical forms, releasing three albums that are now quite hard to get hold of - "The Trip" (1967), "The Joker Is Wild" (1968) and "Ahead of Hair" (1969).

The last of these was an idiosyncratic, percussion-laden take on the musical "Hair", recorded while he was working as a drummer in the Sydney stage version alongside prog-rock group Tully. Here's the title track (thanks Reza!) :


"Hair" - John Sangster
DOWNLOAD TRACK - not included in album download

During the mid to late 1960s, Sangster was also a member of the Don Burrows Quartet, and played on the album "The Jazz Sound Of the Don Burrows Quartet", previously featured on this blog.

That group, combined with Sangster's vibes, formed the core sound for a series of soundtracks by renowned soundtrack composer Sven Libaek, including "Inner Space" and "Solar Flares".

"Australia and All That Jazz" was commissioned by the Australian Museum - a museum of natural history - as the soundtrack for a series of 16mm wildlife documentary films by the museum's filmmaker Howard Hughes (no, not that one). Working here with the Burrows group and three additional woodwind players, Sangster himself plays vibraphone, an array of percussion and occasional simple fender rhodes (see the "Rain" preview at the top).

Ironically, the bulk of the funding for the project was provided by mining company BHP, perhaps as a payback for the fact that they were ripping up the Australian landscape at the time and wiping out much of the wildlife being celebrated here.


"First Light"

Sangster had previously worked on Sven Libaek's soundtrack for a series of nature documentaries that ran under the title "Nature Walkabout". Libaek's 1965 soundtrack had followed the standard formula, applying "human" drama to the scenes of animal activities and the power of nature.

from internal booklet, full scans in downloads

"The Birds"

For a nature documentary score, Sangster's approach here is radically different to that of Libaek - he incorporates the sound of nature itself into the soundtrack, via field recording, tape manipulation and melodic scoring for instruments - including Don Burrow's flute utilising echo-delay - that reflects the calls of birds, other animals and the elements.

While these are techniques that were common to the work of classical and experimental composers of the time, it was unusual to hear them both in a jazz context and used in such a lyrical fashion. Later on the the 70s and 80s these sort of techniques were used and abused in a range of appalling "new age" music, but here there's still a freshness.



"The City"

Nature's drama is also reflected in rhythmic sequences that reference occasional latin and afro-style beats, in the time-honoured 70s library tradition of non-european cultures being seen as 'wild', but also stemming from Sangster's genuine love for and engagement with a range of musics.

The first of his albums to cross over with his environmental interests, it's divided into two sides : "Where Water is Plentiful" and "Dry Australia", referring to the titles of two of the films the music was originally scored for. This album took the structures of and ideas behind the original recordings and developed them further in the studio.




"man, the destroyer"

I've got several albums by Sangster and others to follow in a continuing examination of the "library connection", so I hope you enjoy this one. The WAV and MP3 downloads in the comments both include scans of the four page internal booklets from the album.


TRACKLIST

All tracks written by John Sangster except Track 1 by Don Burrows.

SIDE ONE - "WHERE WATER IS PLENTIFUL" 

01. 'first light'
The bush comes to life

02. 'sunrise'
The rising sun brings to life the flowers' colours - the Waratah, Gymea Lily and Banksia. This composition features Don Burrows' bass flute.

03. 'the birds'
features Graeme Lyall's tenor saxaphone

04. 'procession of tadpoles & waterstriders'
Don Burrows on alto flute

05. 'possum'
Errol Buddle on bassoon

06. 'forest with birds'
John Sangster on vibraphone and Don Burrows on alto flute

07. 'man, the destroyer'
Tony Buchanan's bass clarinet depicts the destruction of this beautiful environment - but with care, it will survive.

SIDE TWO - "DRY AUSTRALIA"

08. 'the desert'
Don Burrows - bass flute

09. 'skull & bones'
The sun-bleached remains of victims of drought

10. 'the sand swimmer'
Sangster on vibraphone slap-mallets

11. 'rain'
Water brings the desert to life. John Sangster on fender rhodes.

12. 'the knob tailed gecko'
Errol Buddle on tenor saxaphone

13. 'the centre'
Vibraphone improvisation by John Sangster

14. 'the city'
Even the distant city-dweller has his responsibility to preserve this land

MUSICIANS

John Sangster - vibraphone, electric piano, quijada, bells and windchimes, bongos, conga drum.
Erroll Buddle - flute, clarinet, oboe, bassoon, tenor sax
Don Burrows - Concert, alto and bass flutes; clarinet
Tony Buchanan - Flute, clarinet and bass clarinet
George Golla - classical and electric guitars
Graeme Lyall - Flue, clarinet and tenor sax
Derek Fairbrass - drums
Ed Gaston - bass

PRODUCTION DETAILS

Cherry Pie Records
CPS-1008
Recorded at Cherry Pie Studios, Sydney, 1971
Recording Engineers - Warren Mills, Max Harding
Studio Technician - Godfrey Gamble
Cover Design and Layout - Adrian Baine
Photography - Howard Hughes
Front Cover - Darke's Forest, New South Wales
Back Cover - near Bourke, western New South Wales

AUSTRALIAN JAZZ AND THE LIBRARY CONNECTION

#1 : Don Burrows - "The Jazz Sound of the Don Burrows Quartet" (1966)
#2 : Don Burrows - "The Tasman Connection" (1976)
#3 : John Sangster - "Australia and All That Jazz - Vol. 1" (1971)

POST CREDITS

Vinyl rip, scans and text by Simon666

Thanks to Reza for the mp3 of "Hair".

Other blogs referenced here are The Manchester Morgue, Fine Folk and Rafter Lights.
Please thank these folks if you visit them and download their records - comments keep music blogs alive.

Downloads : WAV - MP3 

Don Burrows - "The Tasman Connection" (1976)

AUSTRALIAN JAZZ - THE LIBRARY CONNECTION #2

Don Burrows and his partner George Golla get down to business with three New Zealand musicians in Burrow's most "electric" studio album, named for the Tasman Sea which separates Australia and New Zealand. Although his liner notes propose this as a cross-cultural collaboration, it's more of a disparate group of musicians pushing their individual influences through on different tracks. Some nice bits of fusion, some good easy, some bad easy - a mixed bag that's worth a listen, and quite different from "The Jazz Sound of ..." album - as you'd expect ten years on.

Whereas you can retrospectively draw some musical throughlines from New Zealand albums that involve the indigenous Māori people - particularly through funk, reggae, dub, soul and hip-hop (see my Johnny Rocco Band post) - other New Zealand musicians/composers of the time, rather like their Australian counterparts, don't tend to have a common regional sound or set of styles - though there's some good jazz from New Zealand, check this post.

Too much Fosters? : L-R Don Burrows; Frank Gibson Jr.; Julian Lee; Andy Brown, George Golla.

From memory I saw a version of this band live - I was 14 and playing guitar in metal bands, and my mother used to take me to jazz concerts to try and gently enact some sort of conversion. It didn't work at the time - I went funk then punk instead - but here I am posting the album more than thirty years later. Congratulations mom.

Burrows had been experimenting with electronic attachments across a few albums, and here he's often using harmonic-doubling, wah-wah and some distortion on some of his woodwinds, particularly the clarinet that you hear in "Twilight Zone" and at the start of "The Tasman Connection"(video at top)


Guitarist George Golla seems to have been listening to some CTI-era George Benson, but he's using a seven-string guitar so clearly is one up on George B :) Actually, I should stop being mean to George, he released his solo album "Easy Feelings" in 1976 which contained one decent track called "The Dancers", which was sampled by DJ Shadow at some stage (but wasn't everyone?)



"The Dancers" (excerpt) - George Golla
DOWNLOAD TRACK (not in album download)

Back to the album ... On keyboards and horns we have Julian Lee, a blind man who had a substantial career as an arranger and musician. He was George Shearing's primary arranger for much of the 1960s on albums like "New Look!" and "Deep Velvet". He did string arrangements on a few albums by Gene Harris and the Three Sounds, including "Beautiful Friendship" from 1965, as well as a few albums by Gerry Mulligan.


"Judo" excerpt

With that background, Lee is something of an easy listening force here melodically, and contributes three compositions which range from pleasant soul-jazz ("Judo") to übercheese ("Get Into it" and "Long White Cloud") The Māori name for New Zealand is Aotearoa, most commonly translated as "land of the long white cloud". In recent years Lee has moved to Australia, and has won several awards for his music education programs for blind children.

In contrast, drummer Frank Gibson Jr is more of a fusion figure - the year before this, he led a group called Dr Tree on a self-titled album that Reza pointed us to in one of the recent recommendation posts here (someone's subsequently posted a better version at the Prog Not Frog forum). That album began with a short track called "The Twilight Zone" which is here expanded in a six minute version built around Gibson's rolling Elvin Jones-ish scatter drums, and is the best thing going here.


"Twilight Zone" excerpt

Frank Gibson moved to the UK soon after this recording, initially working with some jazz and fusion groups like Paz and Morrissey-Mullen, then moving into pop and art-rock circles with Rick Wakeman, Leo Sayer and others. Back in New Zealand he frequently collaborated with Andy Brown, the bass player from here, on projects like their Space Case band.

Anyway hope you enjoy this one, vinyl rips/posts take a while to do so keep the comments a comin' thanks ...

MUSICIANS
Don Burrows - clarinet, electric clarinet, flute, alto flute, B-flat school flute, percussionGeorge Golla - seven string electric guitarJulian Lee - electric piano, electric organ, flugel horn, trumpetAndy Brown - bass, electric bassFrank Gibson Jr. - drums, percussionTRACKLIST
01. The Tasman Connection (4:52) - Don Burrows
02. Blues Crossover (5:06) - George Golla
03. Don't Contact Us (5:41) - Don Burrows
04. Remember When (4:50) - George Golla
05. Judo (5:36) - Julian Lee
06. Get Into It (2:30) - Julian Lee
07. Long White Cloud (6:11) - Julian Lee
08. In A Mellow Tone (8:34) - Duke Ellington
09. I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free (2:58) - Billy Taylor
10. Twilight Zone (5:58) - Frank Gibson Jr.
PRODUCTION DETAILS

Cherry Pie CPF 1026
Album concept and direction - Don Burrows
Recorded at Stebbing Studios, New Zealand
Additional recording, mixing and post-production at EMI Studio, Sydney Australia.
Engineer - Martin Benge
Production - Graeme Rule
Design concept and graphics - Brian Crowther
Cover notes - Don Burrows
Cover photo by Stephen Cooney
Many thanks to Julian Lee for his inspiration, interest and support. AUSTRALIAN JAZZ AND THE LIBRARY CONNECTION

#1 : Don Burrows - "The Jazz Sound of the Don Burrows Quartet" (1966)
#2 : Don Burrows - "The Tasman Connection" (1976)
#3 : John Sangster - "Australia and All That Jazz - Vol. 1" (1971)POST CREDITS

Vinyl rip by Simon666
Other blogs linked to in this post are : Prog Not Frog, Music Peace & Love to the World, My Jazz World and Aussie Funk.
Please thank these other folks if you visit and download from their blogs

Download : WAV - MP3

"The Jazz Sound of The Don Burrows Quartet" (1966)

"Kaffir Song" excerpt

AUSTRALIAN JAZZ - THE LIBRARY CONNECTION #1

I want to write about some ideas here, so click the preview above for a soundtrack while you read. While I've been following a couple of strands in 70s Australian jazz, I've also been listening to a lot of 'library' music, and have been led to wonder why I hear so many similar stylistic threads across these two genres.

Library music, for those unaware, is music composed under contract to companies who subsequently sell it off to film makers, TV programs and commercials, usually by genre - action, romance and so on. Strangely, this older production process is most closely paralled in the production and marketing of contemporary pop music, as the large companies battle to get singles from their latest flash-in-the-pan starlets over the credits of the latest teen slasher film ...

A lot of library music records from the 1970s (and more recently, the 1980s) have retrospectively been hailed as great music, although they were not taken seriously back in the day. In the same way that we recycle fashions and cultures from decades past - by reducing them to signifiers, dressing with an 80s "look" taken from a video clip rather than dressing like people actually dressed in the 1980s - over time we appreciate the reductionist vision of something like "soundalike" blaxploitation library music; whereas back-in-the-day we may have seen it as a gauche simulacrum of what we considered to be "real".

In some ways the Australia of my childhood in the 1960s and 1970s was a "library culture", a distant vision of an idea of England transplanted into a hostile climate. As a then-anglo culture, we would sweat it out over a hot oven roast for Christmas lunch (these days it's cold seafood) in a mid-summer temperature of 40 degrees, the sun nearly melting the fake Christmas snow that shopkeepers would spray onto their windows from a can. Heavily winter-robed Santas would faint in shopping centres from heat exhaustion. As late as the early 80s I remember marvelling at the 60s 'mod' revivalists sweating it out in their thick parkas in the hot summer sun, as they rode their scooters in formation to Bondi Beach. A copy of a copy of a copy.

It was a million miles away from the diverse Sydney that I live in now, with its essentially eurasian population - we all eat with chopsticks as much as with knives and forks - with architecture that begins to emerge from the urban environment rather than pining for an imagined homeland, and social mores that reflect a mix of cultures, sexualities and peoples.

Musically - particularly in genres with an african or afro-american heritage, such as jazz - in these earlier times we were a step further removed from the European distillation of jazz that occured from interaction with American players - on the other side of the planet, we'd copy the distillation, which is perhaps why some of the Australian jazz of the period - Crossfire, Galapagos Duck and others- reminds me of some of the MPS catalogue.

With a small population, jazz players and composers were also forced to find employment wherever they could, often composing for nature documentaries, TV shows, commercials, corporate videos - whatever they could get. This would often make up the majority of their recorded output, and thus it was natural for some of the made-to-style aesthetics to carry across to their "own" records - music that refers to jazz, or as in the title of this record, a "Jazz sound".

I'm starting this strand of exploration with this particular record because it features two of the people I'm going to track across a few albums each, woodwind player Don Burrows and percussionist/vibraphonist John Sangster. You might know their sound from a series of better-known soundtrack albums by film composer Sven Libaek, such as the underground "Inner Space" soundtrack for a television ocean documentary, and "Solar Flares". Burrows' tenor and breathy flute, together with Sangster's vibes, are pretty much the hallmark of the Libaek sound.

Most of the other players here would also appear on Libaek's soundtracks, as well as Burrows' earlier, great soundtrack for the 1968 film "2000 Weeks". Interestingly, that film itself engaged with the same concerns of "faux-English" culture that I was talking about above. Now, I'm with Bacoso in his summation of Burrows' 70s albums there - they're uneven, always include some stinkers, and his constant guitarist George Golla was always a somewhat-constrained, workhorse jazz musician. Neverthless, there are some good moments on several of these albums that I'm going to try and extract.

In retrospect, I think Burrows' importance in Australian jazz was more that he attempted to explore beyond his own capabilities and experience, delving into many musical cultures, and opening the eyes of people who were attracted to his own easy style, but subsequently led to other places. John Sangster, however, went on to achieve more in his own explorations.


This album was originally released in 1966 on EMI/Columbia, then re-released in 1977.

The '77 version has a cover (above) that could have resulted from a psychedelic battle between the various 1970s wallpapers that inhabited my childhood home, with everything eventually merging to a sullen, browny pink. I've put both covers in the downloads so that you can choose your favourite.


"Kaffir Song" excerpt

Although this is neither a library nor a soundtrack album, the good tracks here are the ones that reference other musical cultures in what I'd call a "library style". I can imagine some sections of Sangster's "Kaffir Song" played over flickering black-and-white 50s footage of African natives on a hunting expedition, with a jokey faux-British voiceover contextualising their exploits for Harry and Mabel back home. But I like it for Sangster's vibes workout and Burrows' fife sound.


"Esa Cara" excerpt

Burrow's "Esa Cara" shows his burgeoning interest in the rhythms and melodies of Brazil, a fascination that would later result in a number of interesting collaborations. I like the sweetness of his tenor here, even if it does dive for the easy harmonic resolve a little more often than the relative boldness of 'actual' Brazilian harmonic progression.


"Rain On Water" excerpt

Starting with a cymbal crash, Sangster's "Rain On Water" would go well with faded colour 16mm footage of Japanese people undertaking some sort of religious ceremony (El Goog reaching adulthood? Wara Katsu attaining ninja status?) - perhaps with a dissolved overlay of falling cherry blossoms. It's a distant Antipodean idea of "Japanese-ness" that I somehow like on its own referential terms.

"De Veras?" has some good melodies, but after that we descend into the elevator filler. Generally we've got sparse textures here - there's no drum kit apart from on the closer "Pink Gin". Sangster later developed his skills as a drummer on the local stage version of 'Jesus Christ Superstar', but after this album the quartet took on Alan Turnbull as a drummer while Sangster went off to develop his own work.

Anyway, I'm clearly back to my long rants, so I'll leave you to check this one out. Let me know what you think of it.

LINKS

MP3 - WAV 

TRACKLIST

1. "Kaffir Song" - 4:27 - (John Sangster)
2. "Love Is For the Very Young" - 2:25 - (David Raksin, arr. Golla)
3. "Esa Cara" - 3:18 - (Don Burrows)
4. "Slightly Blue" - 5:50 - (Don Burrows)
5. "Hard Sock" - 4:06 - (Don Burrows)
6. "Rain On Water" - 3:25 - (John Sangster)
7. "Algeciras" - 3:13 - (John Sangster)
8. "De Veras?" - 3:29 - (George Golla)
9. "Pink Gin" - 3:50 - (George Golla)

MUSICIANS 

Don Burrows - fife, flute, alto flute, clarinet, alto saxaphone
John Sangster - vibes, percussion
Ed Gaston - bass
George Golla - guitar

PRODUCTION DETAILS

Produced by Eric Dunn
Columbia-EMI SCXO 7781
Recorded on 8 June & 5 October 1966
re-release 1977 : World Record Club R 05193
Liner notes by John Rippin

AUSTRALIAN JAZZ AND THE LIBRARY CONNECTION

#1 : Don Burrows - "The Jazz Sound of the Don Burrows Quartet" (1966)
#2 : Don Burrows - "The Tasman Connection" (1976)
#3 : John Sangster - "Australia and All That Jazz - Vol. 1" (1971)

POST CREDITS

Vinyl rip by Simon666 (WAV/MP3)
Album links in this post go to Orgy In Rhythm, The Manchester Morgue and Holy Warbles.
Please thank these folks if you visit them and snatch their records.

Galapagos Duck - "St James" (1976)

Continuing the series of rare mid-70s Australian jazz albums (also see "Crossfire" from last week), this is the third album from Sydney-based band Galapagos Duck from 1975. Formed in 1969, they were initially the house band at "The Basement", the city's main jazz venue. I used to come across them in my teens, often playing at outdoor festivals. This album features guest woodwinds player Don Burrows, something of a stalwart in the jazz scene of the time. The album was produced by Horst Liepolt for his 44 Records label - Liepolt seems to have been behind most of the city's jazz releases, festivals and venues in the 60s and 70s.

It features the ubiquitous rhodes and wah-wah woodwinds of the period and has a good loose, live feel on most tracks, with little overdubbing. Strange mix of tracks as an overall album, though - sometimes it's riffing on contemporary forms, then suddenly lurches back to trad New Orleans, particularly when Burrows is on clarinet. Reading between the lines, this was a band that had to please many audiences to maintain a working lifestyle in a city that was just starting to develop a jazz scene that went beyond the apeing of classic forms - so there's still a bit of crowd-pleasing going on here. Nevertheless, enough good stuff here to make it worthwhile, and I like McNamara's work on keyboards in particular. Hope you enjoy it!

Thanks to Keith from the Midoztouch community forum for the rip and scans.

TRACKLIST

01. 'St James Infirmary' (Trad, arr. Galapagos Duck)
02. 'Flutin' ' (Galapagos Duck)
03. 'Ivory Moss' (Tom Hare, Chris Qua, Marty Mooney)
04. 'For Elizabeth' (Galapagos Duck)
05. 'Hey Timbales' (Marty Mooney, Tom Hare, Chris Qua ) 
06. 'That Particular Model' (Paul McNamara)
07. 'What Am I Doing Here' (Paul McNamara) 
08. 'Teo' (Paul McNamara) 
09. 'Mr Bojangles' (J. J. Walker)
10. 'Squeelers and Grunters' (Galapagos Duck)

PERSONNEL 

Tom Hare - trumpet, drums, saxaphones, flugelhorn
Don Burrows - clarinet, baritone sax, 5 key school flute, cabasaMarty Mooney - tenor sax, flute, clarinet
Paul McNamara - electric piano, acoustic piano
Chris Qua - bass, bass violin, flugelhorn
Willie Qua - drums, flute, electric flute

PRODUCTION INFORMATION 

44 Records
Catalogue number 6357 704
Recorded November-December 1975Produced by Horst Liepolt
Recorded and mixed by Ross Kirkland at the Earth Media Recording Company, Sydney.
Album design by Lorraine Hall
Photos by Terry Slyer Graphic Concept
Distributed in Australia by Phonogram Pty Ltd

DOWNLOAD