Album of the day: Brand X, “Moroccan Roll”

Brand X
“Moroccan Roll” (Cd Virgin CASD 1126)

The sun beats down on the August bank holiday just like on the cover of this album by Brand X, an excellent English jazz-rock band that featured Phil Collins on drums (on temporary vacation from Genesis), the fretless bass wizard Percy Jones, the liquid and harmonically foggy keyboards of Robin Lumley, the percussionist Morris Pert equipped with an immense arsenal of instruments of different colors, and the guitar of John Goodsall, ex Atomic Rooster, capable of combining the love for free jazz improvisation with the sounds of rock.

Technically impressive, Brand X loved to create long jam sessions with a very fluid compositional structure, partly influenced by early Weather Report but with sudden entirely composed sections that recalled progressive groups such as Soft Machine and Gentle Giant. Live performances were the most successful dimension
for the group, who often felt tied down by the temporal constraints imposed by an album’s front.

After the first two albums, “Unorthodox Behaviour” (1976) and this “Moroccan Roll” (1977), which also represent the artistic zenith of the band, Lumley and Goodsall became the two fixed elements of a collective in continuous movement, which already starting from the album “Livestock” introduced new musicians such as the drummers Kenwood Dennard, Mike Clarke and the keyboardist Peter Robinson.

The ear turned to Middle Eastern sounds characterizes this very refined album even if no attempt to refer to the language of that music is implemented, even when Goodsall uses the colors of the sitar or Pert takes out the most exotic percussion instruments from his drawer; we always remain within the scope of an Anglo-Saxon fusion, absolutely not commercial (Brand X’s records began to have sales success only many years after the group’s dissolution).

There aren’t many albums where you can hear Collins singing in Sanskrit, but that’s exactly what happens on the opening track “Sun in the Night,” the only one that has a shred of song form. All the other tracks are instrumental, with strong performance virtuosity and considerable writing interest; a record that deserves to be listened to several times, to fully enjoy all its multiple layers of meaning.

Carlo Boccadoro, composer and conductor, was born in Macerata in 1963. He lives and works in Milan. He collaborates with soloists and orchestras in different parts of the world. He is the author of numerous books on musical subjects.

This text is taken from “Lunario della musica: Un disco per ogni giorno dell’anno” published by Einaudi, courtesy of the author and the publisher.