New album: Endless River
Artist: Pink Floyd
Label: Columbia
Rating: 4.5 stars out of 5
The conventional thinking was that Pink Floyd’s 1994 studio album The Division Bell would be their last, so the news that one final album was coming in 2014 was the music industry surprise of the year.
To be fair, the music industry died about seven years ago, but Pink Floyd’s fans have been wondering if the unreleased music from the 1993 The Division Bell sessions would ever see the light of day. According to recent interviews with the BBC, band members David Gilmour and Nick Mason said The Division Bell was originally supposed to be a two-disc project — a disc of proper songs and a disc of ambient/improvisational music reminiscent of the band’s golden 1968-1972 period.
Since The Division Bell ended up being a one-disc album of songs with vocals, hours of unreleased instrumental music sat in David Gilmour’s tape vault for years. Roughly two years ago Mason and Gilmour collaborator/Roxy Music guitarist Phil Manzanera toyed with the idea of the unreleased music being used as a soundtrack to an upcoming science fiction film. Eventually it was decided to sift through the 20 hours of improvisations that Gilmour, Mason and keyboardist Richard Wright (deceased 2008) recorded in 1993 and turn it into an album.
On paper, it looks like The Endless River should be a train wreck, but in fact it is a return to the way Pink Floyd made some of their greatest music. Fans of experimental Pink Floyd albums such as A Saucerful Secrets or Meddle will find The Endless River to be a welcome addition to the Floyd catalog.
The one song with vocals — album closer “Louder Than Words” — acts an ethereal line drawn under Pink Floyd’s entire career. The rest of the album is peppered with bits of dialog from band members and even an encore appearance by theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking. But for the most part, The Endless River is a collection of inventive, emotional music, free to breath instead of being weighed down by an overbearing lyrical concept.
While most of the music here was recorded in 1993, Gilmour and Mason recently added additional guitar/drum parts to their original sessions with Wright. Playing like a soundtrack that would probably be better than any movie it would underscore, The Endless River is a throwback to the days when people would put on an album and (gasp) just sit and listen to it.
In this last gasp, Pink Floyd sounds invigorated. Since these recordings were originally never intended for public consumption, the band plays with the same sense of abandon featured on their pre-Dark Side Of The Moon output. Drummer Nick Mason even lets loose with some of his loosest playing since the days of Live at Pompeii. To up the music nerd geek-out factor, one piece features Wright playing the Royal Albert Hall organ.
Gilmour’s guitar work is predictably superb, but it’s the piano, organ and synthesizer work of Richard Wright that is the star of The Endless River. His melancholic, jazzy playing always tied the disparate threads of Pink Floyd together, and in this largely instrumental format his playing and writing is finally given the spotlight it always deserved.
Classic album: Marshall Allen presents Sun Ra And His Arkestra/In The Orbit Of Ra
Artist: Sun Ra & His Arkestra
Label: Strut
Rating: 4.5 stars out of 5
A decade or so before Pink Floyd figured out how to make the avant garde a somewhat mainstream affair, there was Sun Ra.
Born Herman Blount in Alabama in 1914, Sun Ra claimed to be an alien from Saturn or thereabouts. He was a gifted jazz keyboardist, composer and band leader. He could whip out straight jazz in the vein of Duke Ellington, but in an instant shift into spacey pieces of music that sounded like it would have been played by the house band in a nightclub on, well, Saturn.
There was a fair amount of humor in Ra’s persona and stage costumes, but whether this was a way to pull attention to his music or the actions of a truly disturbed individual, much of the music is incredibly inventive. With a discography creeping into the hundreds, not counting unreleased material or albums pressed in small numbers to be sold at shows or through his fan club, trying to break into the Sun Ra catalog can be daunting.
Thankfully, longtime Sun Ra collaborator/Arkestra leader Marshall Allen has partnered with Strut Records to release In The Orbit Of Ra, a two-disc compilation that cuts through the noise and pulls out some of the greatest songs in the Sun Ra catalog.
Compilations are usually cash-ins for record companies and pacifiers for lazy fans who only want to hear the songs they already know. But with a mountain of albums that can be sometimes as irritating as they are brilliant, it was a good idea to pull the Sun Ra tunes such as “The Lady With The Golden Stockings,” “Plutonium Nights” and “Angels And Demons At Play” together. Having these organized, thoughtfully arranged tunes together on an album is a good way to pull in novices who might be scared to death by some of the crazier Ra epics that also inhabit his many albums.
Everything Ra ever did was at least loosely classified as jazz, but there’s no denying songs such as “Solar Differentials” or “Have You Heard The Latest News From Neptune?” had an impact on the experimental side of Ummagumma-era Pink Floyd. The mesmerizing live version of “Dance Of The Cosmo Aliens” wouldn’t be totally out of place on a live Santana album from the 1970s.
Without a doubt, In The Orbit Of Ra is the best place for the curious to start.
Jon Dawson’s album reviews appear every Thursday in The Free Press. Contact Jon at www.jondawson.com.