RECORDS
TEREO A-9166
During the 1950s, it became habitual for writers
on jazz to make reference to differences between
East Coast and West Coast approaches to the
music. As is usually true with all-inclusive labels
of this sort, there was an element of gimmickry,
of public-relations hype, involved (just as there
has been more recently with such short-lived
musical non-categories as: folk-rock, raga-rock,
jazz-rock, acid-rock, and all of that species of
ballyhoo). But, beneath the press-agentry and
advertising copy prose, there was also something
real in the presumed differences between the
jazz of the two coasts. Broadly speaking, the
Westerners were more concerned with innova-
tions involving form, whereas the Easterners were
satisfied to utilize the existing forms, even sim-
plifying them on occasion, in an effort to attain
greater emotional substance (content) in their
playing.
Something of the same dichotomy, it seems to
* me, has quietly and inconspicuously opened up
in the New Music of the 1960s—though without
anything like the hostility, acrimoniousness, and
feuding of the previous decade, it must quickly
be added. In the East, to generalize once more,
the tendency of the major innovators—the late
John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Cecil ‘Taylor,
Archie Shepp, Bill Dixon, Pharaoh Sanders,
Albert Ayler, Andrew Hill, and a phalanx of
others—have tended Jess to experiment with novel
formalistic devices than to search within them-
selves and their instruments to find new ways of
communicating feelings and emotions. Of course
this sweeping generalization, like all such, is im-
perfect. Nonetheless, when one thinks of the
contributions of the men named above, one re-
calls primarily the wealth of new sounds they
have been able to create from their instruments,
and hence the way in which they have been
able to extend the palette of emotions which jazz
music is able to render. 5
Here in the West, on the other hand, the
emphasis in the New Music has leaned more
toward the formal side—the incorporation of in-
struments hitherto unknown in a jazz context
(some invented by the musicians themselves),
the use of unusual time signatures, the subdivi-
sion of the Western diatonic (12-tone) scale into
microtones, and so on. A goodly portion of this
activity, moreover, has been stimulated by the
ubiquitous and persistent interest in all things
Indian that flourishes in the hot-house Southern
California milieu. (To provide a complete expla-
nation for this interest would require a small
essay in itself. Suffice it for the present to say
that the erosion of the reassuring bonds of re-
ligion, ethnicity, regional custom, and family
ties that occurs upon migration to California
produces an enormous population with no fixed
institutional roots or values to sustain it. Add to
that the loneliness and anonymity of urban ex-
istence, and especially the vast gulf for most
people between exalted, Hollywood-inspired as-
pirations and mundane achievements, and you
begin to comprehend why various shades of Ori-
ental mysticism have found Southern California
such a fertile field in which to grow. )
Certainly percussionist Emil Richards has to
be ranked among the leading figures in these new
developments. With Don Ellis and bassist-sitarist
Bill Plummer (the latter also an Impulse artist),
Emil was one of the founders of the Hindustani
Jazz Sextet, from whence sprang many of the
subsequent efforts to integrate Indian elements
into jazz. “I had a percussion school going in the
[San Fernando] Valley,’ Emil recalls of the
period around 1964, “with a few interesting
guys — Irv Cottler and Bill Craft, the tympanist
with the [Los Angeles] Symphony. We figured
if a guy came out of our school, he had every-
thing covered—tympani, drums, mallets, He was
an all-around percussionist. Then we heard that
Hari Har Rao was in town, teaching Indian
thythms and tabla and some sitar. He started
teaching at our school and it got to where all the
professional musicians were students, ’cause we
all got interested. Some of the bass players and
drummers that are now around playing in the
odd times, were all his students. Don [Ellis] had
. just come back from New York; he was studying
privately with Hari Har at the college UCLA.
He brought him by the school and we started
blowing some blues and I Got Rhythm in 7, 9,
11, 13...and we all got frustrated and would
woodshed every day on our own before we got
together, to be sure we knew what was happen-
ing. It was really a weird experience for me,
man. I can tell you that I wanted to really give
up!... When you're blowing on tunes where
changes are going by, you know, and you're not
used to skipping one beat every bar, man, it’s
pretty hairy at first. It was pretty hairy for about
a year.”
Ultimately, however, the stage of initial frus-
tration passed; Emil and some of the other musi-
cians began to feel more at home in what he
calls the ‘‘odd times.” (Now, in fact, he is com-
fortable even in such out of the ordinary meters
as 7%: “The half-beats are something I really
want to get into, like on the next album. Seven
and a-half is really where a lot of kids are feeling
it, but they just don’t know how. I’d like to do
more in that bag.”.) It was asa result of this
constant jamming in different signatures that
the Hindustani Jazz Sextet coalesced. “Just about
that time, Don started the big band, and we are
all playing with that as well as the small group,”
Emil recounts. His tenure with the Ellis organi-
zation turned out to be relatively brief. “Let’s just
say that studio commitments wouldn’t allow me
to continue with either band.”
After leaving, Emil began putting together
his own groups and music for a pair of albums
on the Uni label, with the Moog (pronounced
mogue: to rhyme with vogue) synthesizer being
utilized on the latter—probably the first recorded
instance of jazz usage of the synthesizer.
Besides his use of uncommon meters, Emil
also seeks to widen the scope of his music through
a subdivision of the European dodecaphonic sys-
tem into micro-tones. In part, this reflects his
involvement with Indian spiritual values, in par-
ticular the system of meditation made famous by
the Maharishi Mahesh Ygoi. Side II of the pres-
ent recording is an immediate case in point, since
it contains Emil’s suite on meditation, Journey
to Bliss. The suite includes a poem which, ac-
cording to Emil, “in some way says what happens
while you’re meditating. I figured diatonic in-
struments couldn’t portray it, and micro-tonal
instruments are getting close—they can do every-
thing the human voice can do, just about. What-
ever you feel, if you can say it with instruments
or tones, then you're trying to portray it. Words
aren’t adequate to describe feelings that happen
during meditation; but this is an attempt.”
On Side I of the album, says Emil, “I wanted
to use the micro-tonal instruments with Indian
Produced by BOB THIELE
thythms....I feel there’s a lot of merit in the
time signatures that the Indians use. And to put
it to jazz blues or ‘Rhythm’ tunes that we play,
it’s really interesting. And now to incorporate
the micro-tonal thing, as Chuch [bassist Chuck
Delmonico, who frequently plays in groups led
by Emil] says, in one sitting, to get so many
colors on one album, he thought it was pretty
fantastic. And that’s what I was trying to do....
Jazzis a product of what people in America are,
and what people in America are trying to do
musically. Right now, spiritually, rhythmically,
and now harmonically—because I know our tones
don’t have enough tones—health-wise, in many
ways, I feel the Indians have quite a bit to offer.
I’m trying to incorporate that in my American
way.”
It is this “American way” that makes Emil’s
music much less formidable than all the talk of
odd times and micro-tones might lead one to
expect. In actuality, find it comfortably familiar;
in feeling, it puts me rather in mind of the type
of modal blues that John Coltrane explored so
persuasively on the series of albums he cut for
Atlantic (e.g. Equinox). Comments Emil: “Yeah.
You could say that, in the sense that you play
on certain scales, in the way “Trane has been
doing, and Miles. We’re enlarging those scales.
Instead of blowing on one montuna chord.in a
twelve-tone scale, we've been messing around ona
montuna of anywhere from 22 to 33 to 43 tones.”
Looking beyond this album, Emil hopes that
his efforts will bring wider public acceptance for
such things as micro-tones and unusual meters.
“I’m hoping that not only the jazz audience, .. .
but the kids are going to pick up on dancing to
this, because every concert I play and see people
bob and weave around in these times, man. I
would just love to see kids in like a teenage fair
or something dancing to this shit—see where
that’s at, you know?” And who is to say that just
may not happen, sooner than any of us think?
About the Selections
Maharimba is in 7/4. The “A” section is eight
bars long, counted 322; the “B” section, or
bridge, is four bars in length, counted 3344, 3344.
THE NEW WAVE OF JAZZ IS ON
AS-9166
RECORDS
Following the bridge, there are four more mea-
sures of “A,” again counted 322. Bliss, in 11/4,
is pulsed 3332. (Its feeling is that of a three-
measure blues waltz, with a reiterated two-beat
tag.) The ensemble portion of Mantra is in 5/4,
counted (for two measures) as 3223. In the blow-
ing portion, this is “simplied” to 32. Enjoy, Enjoy
is in a twelve-based meter, and can be counted
(take a deep breath) as 32331 or 57 or 444 or
3333 or 6/8 or 3/4 or 12/8 or 4/4 or, as Emil
puts it, as “????”!! Indeed.
Journey to Bliss, Emil’s suite on the medita-
tion experience, is comprised of six movements.
The first is in 19/4, played 332221222. The
second is in 12/4 (32331); the third is “free”
(1/1); the fourth is in 10/8 (3331 four times,
32 eight times); the fifth, in 7/4 (322); the last
in 13/4 (3334). Thank you for listening; over
and out.
FRANK KOFSKY
Associate Editor JAZZ & POP
SIDE ONE
1. MAHARIMBA
(Emil Richards, Jules Chaiken)
(Music, Music, Music, Inc.—ASCAP) 202
2. BLISS
(Emil Richards)
(Music, Music, Music, Inc.—ASCAP) 4:57
3. MANTRA
(Emil Richards)
(JPB Music—ASCAP) 4:29
4. ENJOY, ENJOY
(Emil Richards)
(JPB Music—ASCAP) 5:51
SIDE TWO
1. JOURNEY TO BLISS—PART | 3:08
2. JOURNEY TO BLISS—PART I! « 4:10
3. JOURNEY TO BLISS—PART III 2:52
4. JOURNEY TO BLISS—PART IV 3:10
5. JOURNEY TO BLISS—PARTS V & VI 5:18
All Written by: B. Gess, E. Richards
All Published by: D’Azure Music—ASCAP
Cover Photo: FRED SELIGO Back Cover Painting: MICHAEL CRADEN _Liner Design: JOE LEBOW
A Product of ABC Records, Inc., 1330 Avenue of the Americas, N.Y. 10019 * Made in U.S.A.
JOURNEY TO BLISS
EMIL RICHARDS AND THE MICROTONAL BLUES BAND
AS-9166-A at 3314 RPM
Side 1 STEREO
1. MAHARIMBA
(Emil Richards, Jules Chaiken)
(Music, Music, Music, Inc.—ASCAP) 2:52
Music, Music, Inc.—ASCAP) 4:5
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= Ble) 4 ite)
2, (JPB Music—ASCAP)
O.
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7 *Written by: Emil Richards
hag \3°
Cp, go
ecords,inc.New York\NY
JOURNEY TO BI.ISS
EMIL; RICHARDS AND THE MICROTONAL BLUES BAND
AS:9166-B ( 33% RPM
Side 2 STEREO
MEDITATION SUITE.
. JOURNEY TO BLISS—Part ! 3:08
. JOURNEY TO BLISS—Part Il 4:10
. JOURNEY TO BLISS—Part II! 252
. JOURNEY TO BLISS—Part IV 3:10
. JOURNEY TO BLISS—Parts V&VI 5:18
Alt Written by:'B. Gess, E. Richards
7a, All Published by: D’Azure Music—ASAI
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