Love Animal - Bob Moses

Feb

5

Love Animal - Bob Moses

≡ Category: 1960s, Avant-Guarde, Don't Bother, Free Jazz, Fusion, Jazz Funk, Jazz Rock, Post Bop, Reviews, Vocals, World Fusion |
≅ Written by: Michael Kydonieus

DON’T BOTHER

Rating:

Okay, here’s a question for you. Imagine that you’ve come across a date you’ve never heard of before with the following personel: Jim Pepper on tenor, Larry Coryell on guitar, Steve Swallow on bass, Keith Jarrett on keys, and Bob Moses on drums. Would you be interested? Hell, yeah!

Sucker.

I’m always in favor of artists taking risks and mixing things up, and Love Animals (issued on Amulet Records) is a prime example of that. There’s a cover of Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, a blues, some funk, some rock, and even some free jazz.

Too bad the whole thing is almost unlistenable. Wholy Moses is unintelligible dithering, seemingly calculated to be unpleasant. Bob Moses did this sort of thing much better a few years later, with the Open Sky trio and his own classic Bittersuite In The Ozone.

Next up is a blues using the theme of the old children’s song, “The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, the worms play pinochle up your snout,” with a truly unfortunate vocal from Larry Coryell. It’s almost as bad as it sounds.

Amazingly, the great pianist Keith Jarrett has nothing much of interest to add to the pop standard Smoke Gets In Your Eyes. It’s taken rubato with Jim Pepper playing the melody without an ounce of concision or taste. This is bad lounge music, folks.

Mtumba’s Raindance is just Bob Moses farting around on drums and vocal interjections. Again, he did this sort of thing with much more wit on the classic Bittersuite In The Ozone.

Rock Fantasy is like a sloppy Big Brother and The Holding Company jam (and you know what a precision rock outfit they were). I bet these guys were doing a lot of acid when they recorded this. They’re having a better time than you will.

Steve Swallow’s bass intro on Mike Gibb’s Nowhere is formless and pointless — it is indeed Nowhere. I’ve never heard him sound worse. An out of tune Coryell, blustering Jim Pepper, and scattershot Bob Moses join in, making the picture complete.

The painfully inept Slum Funk is next, like the worst dance music Hollywood ever scored to a movie “happening.”

These musical stumblebums end this atrocious date with Dancing Bears, a sonic compost pile if I’ve ever heard one. More like Stumbling Drunken Bears. But these aren’t just any stumblebums. The musicians on Love Animal are individually responsible for some of the best jazz recorded in the 70s.

It’s inexplicable and maddening. Avoid Love Animal like the toxic waste it is. And if by chance you are unlucky enough to come across it in your travels, please don’t automatically avoid any music put out by Larry Coryell, Keith Jarrett, Steve Swallow, and Bob Moses as a result. This recording really is an aberration, I promise.