This LP release, part of ECM’s Luminessence series of high-grade vinyl reissues, offers three new black and white photographs of Garbarek, Rypdal and Christensen inside the handsome new gatefold packaging. Unfortunately, that packaging restores the original typo of “African thump piano” (played by bassist Arild Andersen) which an earlier CD issue had corrected to “African thumb piano”.
In the 1995 edition of The Rough Guide To Jazz, the usually reliable Ian Carr opined that this music was “a double debut – Garbarek and ECM’s first album”. But ECM had already issued six distinctly diverse LPs, while Garbarek had released two albums under his own name – the 1967 Til Vigdis and the 1969 The Esoteric Circle – besides appearing on releases by, e.g., Karin Krog, Egil Kapstad, George Russell, Terje Rypdal and Jan Erik Vold.
Excellent as all that music remains, the release of Afric Pepperbird was to prove crucial. If the spirit of the Art Ensemble of Chicago is at times in the air (sample the use of “little instruments” on Scarabee) the originality of this music is everywhere evident. JJ’s Barry McRae found Pepperbird “surprisingly good” while producer Manfred Eicher sent a copy to Keith Jarrett to show what sort of music ECM was interested in. And the rest, as they say, is history.
Today, the clarity of the recording still arrests attention. So too the breadth and depth of both Garbarek’s tenor sound and the music as a whole. Compare the graduated finesse of the rubato Scarabee with the in-part ostinato-underpinned, pumping, floating and piping blasts of Beast, Blow Away Zone and the title track, which also features some rumbling bass sax. And relish the Webern-like miniatures Mah-Jong, MYB and Concentus, all from Andersen’s hand.
On Blow Away Zone the rock-touched Rypdal sounds closer to Derek Bailey than to the adagio Nordic poet he would become, while Christensen tops off a cooking and typically sensitive group-oriented performance with the brief, Dada-like drum and vocal interplay that is the solo Blupp.
Discography
Scarabee; Mah-Jong; Beast Of Kommodo (20.35) – Blow Away Zone; MYB; Concentus; Afric Pepperbird; Blupp (20.37)
Garbarek (ts, bs, cl, fs, pc); Terje Rypdal (elg, bugle); Arild Andersen (b, African thumb p, xyl); Jon Christensen (pc, v). Oslo, 22-23 September 1970.
ECM 4505317
