The pop side of classical music: Colosseum’s “Bolero”.

1971 Colosseum – Bolero

Although they are perhaps a little forgotten today, compared to other groups, Colosseum have instead played a fundamental role in the history of music: in fact, it is also due to them that at the end of the ’60s jazz rock was somehow cleared and accepted commercially in England. They were born, in the symbolic year 1968, from the union of a handful of talented musicians, who in fact all later joined several other important bands: drummer John Hiseman, saxophonist Dick Heckstall-Smith, bassist Tony Reeves, keyboardist Dave Greenslade and guitarist James Litherland.

With some small changes in the lineup, Colosseum will only release three albums, plus one exclusively for the US market, as we will see, and their artistic career will take place entirely between 1969 and 1971, although in 1975 Hiseman will form Colosseum II, and in the mid-90s there will also be a reunion of the band with the same lineup as when they broke up in 1971.

The group’s music is a mix of various styles: jazz, rock, blues, progressive, full of solos and interactions between instruments, in a perspective that is certainly more jazz than rock. After the release in 1969 of their second album, the masterpiece “Valentyne Suite”, the group’s American label, Dunhill Records, for inscrutable reasons, carried out one of those commercial operations that were frankly difficult to understand: in practice it published, for the United States and Canada, an album with the same cover, but turned towards blue-green, as “Valentyne Suite”, but with a different title, “The Grass is Greener”, with a different set list and some songs that were not present in the original, and even with some different musicians (in fact after the second album David “Clem” Clempson had taken over from Litherland). In short, a real mess, a record “compiled” by the record label and not by the group, which however gives us the opportunity to discover Colosseum’s version of Ravel’s famous “Bolero”, a song that was not in fact present in the “English version” of the record.

The band’s adaptation is considerably faster than the original, and is obviously a perfect showcase for all the soloists in the group, having actually been conceived by Ravel according to the different colors of the orchestra. After a start in which the organ and wind instruments take turns presenting the well-known theme, the new entry Clempson immediately shows what he is capable of by launching into a long guitar solo, supported by a beautiful bass line and the drums that begin to transform the original rhythm from a march towards rock, with Hiseman hitting the drums forcefully making the atmosphere of the piece progressively more and more paroxysmal and frenetic.

Only towards the end does the theme return, the rhythm calms down and returns to the initial one and Heckstall-Smith’s saxophone leads the piece to its conclusion. Probably one of the best “rock” reinterpretations (but with a lot of jazz) of Ravel’s famous composition, which manages to break away from the monotony (desired by the author himself) of the original, giving five and a half minutes of great music.

This sheet is taken from the book “Rock Me Amadeus. The pop side of classical music, the classic heart of rock. When Classical meets Pop, Rock and Disco” by Davide Pezzi (Youcanprint, 252 pages, €19.50, available here) courtesy of the author.

What happens when Mozart, Bach or Beethoven come down from the podium of great music and find themselves among electric guitars, synthesizers and disco lights? “Rock Me Amadeus” explores the fascinating (and sometimes surprising) universe of pop, rock and disco reinterpretations of famous classical songs. The book offers a journey that is both historical and curious, spanning decades of experiments, contaminations and revisitations. There is no shortage of pages dedicated to the less successful versions – testimonies of an era and a taste – which help to understand even better the inexhaustible strength of classical music as a source of inspiration.
With an accessible and documented style, the author guides the reader through anecdotes, records, musicians and arrangements, showing how the dialogue between apparently distant musical worlds can generate new forms of creativity, between genius and (sometimes) naive clumsiness.