BEN — Ben (review)

BEN — Ben album cover Album · 1971 · Fusion Buy this album from MMA partners
3.5/5 ·
Sean Trane
On the ultra-collectible Vertigo catalogue, one of the weirder albums to get released was Ben’s sole self-titled album, with that arrestingly weird leaky faucet tap. Of the sax-fronted, but keyboard-dominated quintet, only drummer Sheen had previously played professionally (with Graham Bond) and would keep on later (with Jonathan Kelly), at least to my knowledge. Made from four long tracks (two aside), Ben is musically-speaking a mainly all-instrumental prog rock that ogles and skews itself heavily towards the JR/F realm (due in no small part to windman Davey’s compositions), with some indisputable instrumental prowess, but avoids to show-off pointlessly.

The opening seven-movement Influence piece is somewhat based on Keith Jarrett Wooing pieces, but we’re definitely in the rock realm; where windman Davey switches between the flute and sax, but it’s McLeary’s keyboard extravaganza that are almost stealing the spotlight away, this despite a good Reid guitar solo in the third movement. Also on the A-side is the no-shorter longer Gibbon piece that opens on a slow sax, but soon speeds up to a psych-jazz soundscape

Over the flipside, Christmas Execution, where the guitar is more prominent than in the rest of the album, veers towards a psych-raga-sounding improv that should wow some early proto-prog fans, but the fade-outs are a bit of a bummer, for we’d have loved to get a succession of chords between sequences. As the title might indicate, the closing Gizmo is another enjoyable psych-JR/F piece, where Davey’s flute is all over the fretboard (if you’ll excuse the musical approximation), but the closing tape speed-up shows that the band probably didn’t master well enough chord changes to write a proper ending.

While I wouldn’t call Ben’s sole musical venture anything close to essential, it’s still a rather enjoyable artefact of that magic early 70’s era, when everything seemed to be musically possible, even if Ben probably never pretended to anything of the genre. So if you’re into Tonton Macoute or other Brit JR/F of the early 70’s, Ben might just be up your alley.

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