Don Ellis
Album: The New Don Ellis Band Goes Underground/Don Ellis At Fillmore
Label: BGO
Tracks: 23
Website: http://www.bgo-records.com

Perhaps best known for his score to The French Connection, had he lived beyond his mid-forties Don Ellis would doubtless have pushed his music even further. As it is, his experimentation with time signatures and how to use a line up of musicians, both on original and interpretative pieces, helped shape contemporary jazz from the mod-sixties onwards.

These two records came out of the West Coast cultural melting pot that found the new rock music hierarchy embracing jazz as it distanced itself from the pop mainstream that had been its incubator. So it was that Ellis found himself opening for the likes of the grateful Dead and Big Brother & the Holding Company and the hippies tuned in and turned on to music he was determined was never going to drop out.

…Goes Underground dates from 1969 and find Ellis fronting a big band line up complete with Patti Allen's vocal raunch on funk flavoured workouts such as the Isleys' It's Your Thing and the opening cut, Al Kooper's House in the Country. Ellis lays heavy on the beat, boots up the melodies and goes for soul gold. It's very much of its time, but it throws a little psychedelic edge to what is actually a fairly trad big band set up.

There's plenty of virtuoso playing, not least from Ellis himself as he expands on the emotive Eli's Comin', while Allen gives Higher the full force of her church upbringing before winding up more of a pop thing on Send My Baby Back. It all reaches a mean and moody climax on the album's final cut, Black Baby with Ellis' trumpet playing counterpoint to a soulful rap.

This two-disc reissue benefits from BGO's reliably sympatico digital remastering, but starting …At Fillmore straight after …Goes Underground really doesn't do it any favours. I

Still, the live album from the legendary 'Frisco hippie hall is arguably Ellis' most fully realised musical expression. He feeds his trumpet through various electronica, pushes the music into meters he didn't even have names for, conjures big band arrangement that defy reason and generally raises the roof, the bar and sheer hell - all at the same time!

We can only imagine what the lysurgically-enhanced audience made of it all.

The first three tracks tacked on the end of Disc One after …Goes Underground serve only to whet the appetite for what follows on Disc Two. From the mind melting sonic excursions that characterise the opening The Blues, to the last notes of his oft-recorded closer Pussy Wiggle Stomp, Ellis produces a masterclass in improvisational innovation. Guitars are used as percussion as much as they are solo instruments, horns form up the most intricate call and response routines, keys goes crazy and there's even room for some 'winds to chime. Hey Jude, the most notable cover, is blown every which way by electronic effects and an almost tongue in cheek juxtaposition of tradition big band and avant garde arrangement.

It's probably fair to say it's all a bit much by today's standards, less is invariably more, but the sound of such unrestrained aural creativity is a rich and rare thing to behold.

Nick Churchill
www.thegranvillechambers.co.uk