Released in April of 1971, Bill Chase was a Schillinger House of Music (later renamed the Berklee College of Music)-trained jazz trumpeter who had cut his teeth in the 1950s playing for Maynard Ferguson, Stan Kenton, and Woody Herman's Thundering Herd. He is often seen on lists of the greatest trumpeters of all-time. This band and album was Bill's attempt to give the "hot ticket" of jazz-rock a try. Sadly, Bill died only three years later in a plane crash at the young age of 40.

1. "Open Up Wide" (3:48) amazing full-throttle brass rock. (8.875/10)

2. "Livin' In Heat" (2:54) a little Broadway musical feel to this one (as well as BS&T). I guess the lead vocals hear must be attributed to Dennis Johnson. (8.875/10)

3. "Hello Groceries" (2:56) R&B brass rock. Jerry Van Blair's lead vocal is pure R&B. (8.75/10)

4. "Handbags and Gladrags" (3:23) slowed down New Orleans funereal music start turns into New York City open air style jazz-rock. Love the wavy, layered horn arrangements in the back ground. Lead vocalist Ted Piercefield sure sounds like David Clayton Thomas. (9/10)

5. "Get It On" (2:59) (8.666667/10)

6. "Boys and Girls Together" (2:56) Ted Piercefield again in the lead vocals. (8.666667/10)

7. "Invitation to a River" (14:13) so much like the soundtrack and arias from a single act of a Broadway musical. Even so, it would be considered great, moving theater music. (27.75/30) a) "Two Minds Meet" - Dennis Johnson again on lead vocals? b) "Stay" - slow and atmospheric with choral background vocals supporting Dennis' plaintive lead. c) "Paint It Sad" - there's that David Clayton Thomas sound and feel again. d) "Reflections" (ad lib) - Astounding horn play--especially from lead trumpeter Bill Chase. e) "River" - more akin to the slow and plaintive music and lyrics of the second movement.

Total time - 33:09

This is an album that sounds as if the Don Ellis Orchestra produced Blood Sweat and Tears and they composed for Broadway musicals. The horn play is amazing throughout this album--so crisp and clear, creative and powerful--but the songs aren't always as engaging and are rarely inventive or forward-thinking (except for the horn arrangements) as some of the other J-R Fusion artists of the day. I feel that Bill and company's compositional and stylistic orientations are quite similar to the music Stephen Schwartz was doing for musical theater.

A-/five stars; a minor masterpiece of theatric brass rock.

Another go round with Pierre, Toto, Jasper, and, this time, all Siggi Busch on the electric bass. Recorded in Hamburg, Germany, in 1970 at Windrose Studio, from November 24 through 27, the album was released in 1971 by MPS Records and distributed by BASF.

1. "Idee A" (4:30) engineered far more toward the accentuation of the electrified elements of the music than anything on Earwax (8.75/10)

2. "Suite": a) "Scorpion" (6:47) spacey experimental soundscapes of a 2001: A Space Odyssey-like cinematic disorder opens up this suite as everyone in the band busies themselves with some unrestricted free-form play--yet there is a flow and tempo and even the shadows of some structural elements including harmony and interplay. The second half goes (13.25/15) b) "Neuteboom" (5:42) buoyed by a very repetitive bass and circus-organ arpeggio line, guitar and electric piano are sent soloing while drummer and bandleader Pierre Courbois messes around with perfect timing beneath. Interesting--and a little annoying after five minutes of the same bass line--though not quite so much when Toto and Jasper begin to try to weave their way into the bass and organ's line. (8.75/10) c) "Scorcussion" (5:56) Pierre is left alone to express on his drum kit. At the end of the third minute of Pierre's soloing Toto starts to inject some noise burst from his fuzz guitar while Jasper adds a spray of chords, flourishes, and crazed hits from his electric piano. At the end of the fifth minute everybody backs off to zero before Toto is given space for some target practice for his alien space ray gun. Despite my understanding the band's effort to take Herbie Hancock's spacey experimentation further, this is just not my cup of tea. (8.5/10)

3. "Silence" (0:18)

4. "Don Paul" (3:09) more jagged, angular jazz musings and exercises in cohesion and cooperation, this one opens a little too aggressively and then just as suddenly and quickly moves into a solo of Siggi's double bass. Eventually, he's joined by brushed drums and dissonant chord play from Toto's un-effected guitar. These guys are obviously so comfortable and proficient at their instruments that they can easily and smoothly do just about anything, but this is not the type of musical listening that I choose to come back to: there's just too much of the crazy Tony Williams Lifetime Emergency! avant garde experimentation going on here for my liking. (8.375/10)

5. "Totemism" (16:45) These guys are obviously so comfortable and proficient at their instruments that they can easily and smoothly do just about anything, but there's just a little too much of the crazy Tony Williams Lifetime Emergency! avant garde experimentation going on here for my liking. (Didn't I already say that?) Luckily, about two minutes into it the quartet gels into a forward-moving, single-direction motif over-and within which all of the individual musicians still find the freedom to move about and pave their own way. Having heard enough of Toto Blanke's guitar playing now to appreciate his skills, I have to say that when he plays like this--like 1960s jazz guitar with an experimental edge-- I am not a fan: impressed, yes, but not a fan. Jasper van't Hof is experimenting with way too much distortion on his electric piano which gives it a very "dirty" sound than I also do not like. This would probably be a very fun song to experience in a live jazz club scene but it is really not my kind of jazz (or jazz-rock fusion)--and here they're forcing 17-minutes of it down my throat! (30.375/35)

6. "Frau Theunisse"n (1:10) a FOCUS-like jam that seems to be coming out of some other jam (it's faded in to get started) but then is over far too quickly. (4.5/5)

Total time 44:17

After the previous year's Earwax, I was very excited to hear this, their follow-up!

B-/3.5 stars; a very good display of experimental, loosely-performed avant garde electrified jazz that feels like a detour down the wrong (but, I get it: necessary) direction. Check it out for yourself but this is no album that I will return to soon--maybe ever.

My first Pat Metheny acquisition. I was a bit thrown by the strange sound palette of Pat's solo work--sometimes layers of treated guitars, acoustic and, I thought, electric. There were also many melodies and structures that were strange to me, his tone so delicate and, I think I felt, folk-country-western, even, sometimes, quite angular and unmelodic. It took a long time for me to become familiar with this music--to eventually "like" it, much less understand it, but something about it kept me coming back, kept me trying--trying to "get inside" the music. Now I listen to it 45 years on and I don't have any issues: I like it all. It's all, of course, very familiar to me now.

Wow! What a ride is the title song "As Falls..." (20:44) (40/40)! Truly one of the great jazz-fuion/prog epics of all-time and, according to my own system of metrics, the greatest of the 1980s. Nana Vasconçuelos, Lyle and Pat take you on a journey into the planetary ethernet before the World Wide Web was even conceived! Then there is Side 2! The joyful "Ozark" (9/10), emotional and beautiful "September Fifteenth" (10/10), and the also-so-joyful "It's for You" (New Chautauqua, Pt. 2) (19/20). I was and still am so blown away by this album. The shock and awe is as powerful as it was the first time I heard it in 1981. A masterpiece of progressive music by one of the most creative, eclectic and prolific music artists of this or any generation.

Though one of Pat and company's early highly-acclaimed albums, containing several much-beloved Metheny career highlight songs, this is an album that contained songs that did not connect with me--a couple that even repelled me. This has actually been the case with me over Pat's entire career: every album has scintillating moments of sheer brilliance while there are always others of abrasive and equally off-putting music. The new addition and use of his Roland G-300 guitar synthesizer provoked a lot of experimentation, some of it pretty demanding of the listener (as were their inspirators like Ornette Coleman).

["Offramp" (8/10)]), some combining styles explored on As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls with the Roland

("Bacarole" [8.75/10]). A lot of his songs and sound choices here still draw from earlier albums, like the New Chatauqua-like "James" (13.25/15), the sensitive and spacious, "The Bat, Part 2" (9/10) and the beautiful earlier drawing étude, "Au lait" (18.25/20) Luckily, the album contains a song whose sonic, emotional, and technical wizardry is of such a high caliber that it alone makes purchase and repeated returns to the album of almost essential importance, "Are You Going With Me?" (20/20).

B+/4.5 stars; a near-masterpiece of Jazz Fusion and a significant contribution to the expansion and evolution of progressive rock music.