A mate of mine has had most of these albums on vinyl for years, and I recall listening to them many, many moons ago. It’s not that I didn’t like them then. But sometimes you only really get into something when the time is right for you. I think I needed a set like this to arrive, so I could easily get into Ian Carr and his Nucleus band.
The boxed set is a nice clamshell affair, with five CDs in card covers that cover nine albums. There are some very detailed and knowledgeable reviews of this set elsewhere on’t interweb (I’ll link to the best one when I get a round tuit).
So I’ll confine myself to a more personal response, here. Ian carr was – as is very obvious when you hear this music – a major Miles Davis fan. And in this music he takes ‘late’ electric Miles as a starting point.
Miles himself did relatively little in this vein, in the context of his entire and very prolific career, before semi-retiring. And some of this stuff, whilst interesting, isn’t the easiest to appreciate, especially where it crosses – mostly thanks to his musical cohorts – into ‘free jazz’ type territory.
Ian Carr and Nucleus take the Miles type influences, along with many others of the times, and combine them in such a way that it’s both very similar, and the influence is very obvious, and yet the music itself is actually more focussed and, in all honesty, palatable.
Nor is it so derivative as to be redundant. Indeed, it’s basically someone taking up the musical torch and carrying it on and into further territory. So I don’t really want to (but probably already have!) overstate the whole Miles thing.
What this is, is great early ’70s fusion, blending jazz, funk, rock, even a bit of folk and prog, into a heady blend, both typical of its time, and yet pretty unique in its exact flavour combinations.
An excellent set, filled with great music. If you like music that goes its own way, and at the same time celebrates and venerates its inspirations, and you love the sounds of this period, as I do, this is an essential listen.