Two Bands and a Legend - Two Bands and a Legend

  by Andrew Carver

published: 4 / 7 / 2007

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Review

Add a bunch of Scandinavian garage rockers, one avant-jazz group and one free-jazz saxophonist and you get ‘Two Bands and a Legend’. Joe McPhee is the titular legend; The Thing and the Cato Salso Experience are the jazzers and rockers. The octet has assembled to go nuts. Their victims: Several appropriately visceral rock tunes, including PJ Harvey’s ‘Who The F**k’, the Kingsmen’s ‘Louie Louie’, the Sonics’ ‘The Witch’ and the Cramps’ ‘I Can’t Find My Mind; a pair of intriguing jazz works (trumpeter Mongezi Feza’s ‘You Ain't Gonna Know Me 'Cause You Think You Know Me’ and James Blood Ulmer’s ‘Baby Talk’) and three originals, one penned by Thing saxman Mats Gustaffson, one by CSE drummer Jon Magne Riise and one by Gustaffson’s daughter Alva Melin of the Swedish primitive rock duo Drap En Hund. Unfortunately, too often the players treat the bridge as an opportunity for everyone to do everything at once, leaving the tune to devolve into a breathless squall of tangled noise. The pleasant exceptions are Feza’s ‘You Ain’t’, which gets a mellow intro and Melin’s ‘The Nut’, where the various instruments stay well-defined, even in their wildest frenzy . Riise’s ‘Too Much Fun’ sounds like an excellent excuse for some heavy duty percussion and a riff that speeds up into a thrashing musical crash, then sgues into a monolgue from McPhee that begins Gustafsson’s ‘Tekla Loo’. Joe McPhee then blows adroitly over a Pirates style riff before it heads off into a predictable, if somewhat entertaining, shambles. The bouncy ‘Baby Talk’ is shoved along by some scratchy guitar and hectic saxophone and thankfully avoids the urge to fall apart but spends too much time rushing nowhere in particular. Sometimes the players just don’t get wild enough: Some frenzied scrabbling on the doublebass leads into ‘The Witch’, but the reading of most of the tune seems sedate in comparison to the brain-bending original. Even the most strenuously atonal brass, pots-and-pans percussion and the tune’s slow devolution into squealing can’t really compete with Gerrie Roslie’s howling vocals (the cover is all instro) and Rob Lind’s demented sax. A frenzy of distorted electronics leads into the swampy riff from the Cramps’ ‘Psychedelic Jungle’ and a decently menacing vocal performance from one of the Cato Salsa crowd, but McPhee’s throttled saxophone is no stand in for Lux Interior’s trademark gibbering. While ‘Two Bands and a Legend’ has its moments, it’s more of an interesting failure than a convincing synthesis of avant-garde jazz and garage rock.

Track Listing:-

1 Who the Fuck
2 The Witch
3 Too Much Fun
4 Tekla Loo
5 Louie Louie
6 You Ain't Gonna Know Me 'Cos You Think You Know Me
7 The Nut
8 Baby Talk
9 I Can't Find My Mind