Leftovers: Ste*--Prog Rock Guitarists Steve Howe, Steve Hackett and Steve Hillage

Yes: Mood For A Day  
[purchase Fragile by Yes]

Steve Hackett: Ace Of Wands
[purchase Voyage of the Acolyte by Steve Hackett]

Steve Hillage: Castle In The Clouds/Hurdy Gurdy Man (Live)
[purchase Live Herald by Steve Hillage]

Ste* was one of the odder themes we had in 2016, and in response, I wrote about brilliant guitarist Steve Tibbetts, a relatively obscure musician whose music, as I said, “exists somewhere in the never particularly commercial intersection of jazz fusion, world music and ambient music.” Thinking about our Leftovers theme, I realized that I was aware of three more guitar virtuosi whose first name is Steve. So, I figured, why not write a little about each of them, in reverse order of their fame.

Despite the fact that all three of them are remarkable guitarists, and have continued to make music for years, I pretty much stopped following their careers years ago. Whether it was a change in their music, or changes in my tastes, or, more likely, a combination of both, I’m really not knowledgeable about their work from after the 1980s, which may well be very good. I do still enjoy the music that they made back in the day.

Steve Howe (who was already the subject of a Ste* post), of course, is best known for his work with Yes. Born in 1947 in North London, he made his first recording, a cover of Chuck Berry’s “Maybelline” in 1964 with the Syndicats, and played in a number of other bands, including Tomorrow and Bodast. Check out this Bodast tune, “Nether Street,” part of which was later used in Yes’ “Starship Trooper.” After passing on the chance to join the Nice and Jethro Tull, once it was clear that Bodast was not going to get a deal, he agreed to join Yes, replacing Peter Banks. Howe’s eclectic influences, including classical, jazz, and rock helped to create the distinctive Yes sound during their best and most iconic period.

He left Yes when it broke up in 1981, wasn’t asked back for the reformation of the band (so, he didn’t play on “Owner of a Lonely Heart”), and reunited with most of the “classic” Yes lineup in Anderson Bruford Wakeman and Howe. He has participated in some, but not all, of the various Yes lineups over the years. I really stopped listening to Howe after he left Yes the first time. I never really paid much attention to his solo albums (including the ones he made while still in the band), or any of the later Yes efforts that he appeared on. There were a few good songs on the first Asia album, but I felt that the band was less than the sum of its parts, and his project with Steve Hackett, GTR, also failed to interest me. Howe continues to record with Yes and in a jazz trio featuring his son on drums, and to perform.

Steve Hackett, Howe’s GTR bandmate, is best known for his work with Genesis. Born in 1950 in central London, he was a self-taught guitarist. After gigging with a few bands, in 1970, he joined Quiet World with his brother John, a flutist, and appeared on their only album, before leaving the band. Hackett put an ad in Melody Maker magazine for musicians "determined to strive beyond existing stagnant music forms." Peter Gabriel answered the ad because his band, Genesis, had lost their original guitarist, Anthony Phillips. Like Howe, Hackett wasn’t the first guitarist in the band which made him famous, but was part of the band’s best, and best known, lineup.

Over time, Hackett began to feel marginalized by Genesis which gradually put less of his music on its albums. After the tour supporting the Wind And Wuthering album in 1977, Hackett left the band. I followed Hackett’s solo work for a while. His first solo album, Voyage of the Acolyte, recorded while he was still in Genesis, featured the band's drummer Phil Collins, who also sang on one song (before he was the lead singer of Genesis), and bassist Mike Rutherford, along with John Hackett, and is probably a minor prog rock classic. I was also a big fan of 1979’s Spectral Mornings, and continued to listen to, and enjoy Hackett’s solo work, to a somewhat diminishing degree, through the mid-1980s.

One of Hackett’s big problems is that he is a great guitarist and a bad singer. So, when he writes songs with lyrics, he either has to bring in outside vocalists with varying success, or sings himself, usually with the assistance of significant processing, and mostly unsuccessfully. After that, I again pretty much lost track of Hackett’s career—occasionally listening to some of his studio and live Genesis “revisited” work, but ignoring most of his varied output, which has ranged from classical, to world music, to blues, to prog and rock. Hackett also continues to record, as a solo artist and with others, and to tour as a solo act, and with a mostly Genesis-based show.

Steve Hillage, the youngest and least well-known of the trio of Steves, was born in 1951 in northeast London. Hillage played in a number of bands as a teenager, a couple of which even recorded and released albums. While attending university in the Canterbury area starting in 1969, Hillage began to play with other musicians and bands in the Canterbury scene. In 1971, he formed Khan, which released one album of psychedelic prog, before breaking up. Hillage then joined Kevin Ayers’ band before becoming a member of Gong in 1973, as the band was starting work in its “Radio Gnome” trilogy. But when Gong inevitably disintegrated, Hillage began a solo career.

I was introduced to Hillage while at WPRB, almost certainly from hearing his great live, spacy cover of Donovan’s “Hurdy Gurdy Man,” from the 1979 album Live Herald, which led me to the rest of his solo work. I will admit that my immersion into the Gong world focused mostly on the later, Pierre Moerlen-led albums which were almost entirely Hillage-free, and it was only much later that I spent any time listening to the bizarre Daevid Allen era band’s eclectic psychedelia that featured Hillage.

Just as I was getting into Hillage’s music, he began to move away from the prog rock guitar heroics that I liked, and into ambient dance music, which I didn’t, so I basically stopped paying attention to his career after the late 70’s. Over the years, Hillage produced albums for a variety of acts, including Simple Minds (pre-Breakfast Club fame) and continues to focus on performing and recording dance music under the name System 7 and Mirror System with his long time musical and personal partner, Miquette Giraudy. He also occasionally participates in Gong reunions. And, for some reason, he appeared on this Elton John cover “sung” by William Shatner.

I’d love to be able to tie this up with some clever ending, but like a post-Thanksgiving turkey, cranberry and stuffing sandwich, it is sometimes better just to be happy that things work together, without overthinking why.

STE* - STEve Miller

purchase [ Brave New World]


Seattle almost matches the STE* requirement - at least it has all the letters. And more. It's my legal home when I'm back in the US of A, but more important to you since you are currently reading this at SMM, is the strength of the city's musical output. I was sure that Steve Miller was from Seattle, but he isn't listed in the Wikipedia link to famous musicians from Seattle. However, the Wikipedia list hasn't got it quite right (your teacher always told you that you shouldn't use Wikipedia as a reliable source). Miller has in fact been associated with/lived in the Seattle area.

The Steve Miller Band was one of my favorites - for some reason up until about the time just after the band turned more commercial (after The Joker/Fly Like an Eagle, both of which I consider decent if not quite like the earlier output)

We have here a cut from 1969's Brave New World, shortly after Boz Scaggs had left. Apparently recorded in a single session in London, the album includes a musician billed as Paul Ramon - doing backing vocals on the track, but also drums and guitar on other tracks on the album. You probably know him better by another name.

Celebration Song

STE*: E.S.T.

I seem to have hundreds of Steves and Stephens on my i-pod, so who said anything about not jumbling it up a bit, which is an apt metaphor, because that is exactly what E.S.T., or the Esbjorn Svensson Trio, did. Nominally a post-modern piano jazz trio, signed to the notoriously serious ECM label, one could be forgiven for suspecting their music to be far too sombre and far too difficult for you, and, at times, you would be right. But at others it can be amongst the most life-affirming use of this most traditional of formats, especially when a scintilla of electronica is added to the blend.

I would be first to admit that I don't know a whole lot about either the band or Esbjorn himself, much above he is no longer with us, having been drowned in a scuba diving accident 8 years ago. So rather than making this a retread of his life and works: you can get that here, I thought I'd just tweak your ears with a snippet or two of his work.
So is it jazz or is it not? Clearly, I guess, yes, but the question merely epitomises the problem with pigeonholing. By applying the label as many potential listeners will be repelled as will be attracted, perhaps many more, jazz often still having a stuffy reputation. So if you recontextualise it as within the classical/electronica interface it still fits. Indeed, with the expansion of this well nigh impossible to truly describe music genre, your Olafur Arnalds and Nils Frahms and their ilk, I am struck how prescient of their current output were this trio a decade or more ago. (Here is an excellent article from the Royal Opera House, of all places, which ties to explain this paradigm.) Anyway I'm listening to them as I write and the drumming alone smacks way more of the dance floor than it is supposed to or that you expect. Uncertain if I'm selling this, so have some more music.

Did I say classical? But this is heavy metal, or could be, already defeating my risible attempts to classify. Which is my point. But never is the eclecticism a distraction, nor the purpose. This is no tailcoat riding exercise in hipster posing, as the more orthodox piece below shows.

The 3 songs showcased are, in order, 'Dolores in a Shoestand', 'Leucocyte' and 'Elevation of Love', perhaps demonstrating that his titles are arguably the only impenetrable within his oevre. I hope this briefest of introductions may entice some further exploring. (Hell, if you come to this site, your ears are probably already open, but, if not?) You could do a lot worse than a lazy start with 'Retrospective: the Very Best of E.S.T.'

Buy it here!

STE*: Steve Tibbetts

Steve Tibbetts: Ur
[purchase]

If you love music enough to read blogs like this, I can almost guarantee that there are a number of times that you first heard a song or an album and had your mind immediately blown. A feeling that you have heard something that was so wonderful, so unlike anything else that you were familiar with, that it stays with you forever. I’ve written about other times this has happened to me, but today I want to write about Steve Tibbetts, whose second album, Yr was a revelation.

Tibbetts is not exactly a household name—he exists somewhere in the never particularly commercial intersection of jazz fusion, world music and ambient music. He is a virtuoso guitarist who painstakingly crafts his albums by overdubbing layers upon layers of instruments, sort of like Mike Oldfield used to do. I remember seeing the album at WPRB—I’m pretty sure someone directed me to it, and from the first listen, I was totally hooked. Our featured song, “Ur,” is the first one on the album, and thus the first one I heard, but they are all great. Beautiful guitar based instrumentals with Indian percussion that moved between soft and lyrical and fast and furious. Each side of the record flowed together as a piece, although there were separate tracks. I really lack the vocabulary to describe the music, so I’m going to steal a quote from a review of Yr from DownBeat Magazine:

Tibbetts overdubs acoustic and electric instruments in a Hendrixian mindscape of production wizardry, often combining up to 20 guitars on one track. He layers the sound into breathtaking guitar choirs and intricate superstructures. His solos are twisting, singing journeys that evolve with the sense of spiritual awakening you’d hear in a Coltrane soprano run. After building to an exuberant climax that nears the breaking point, he supplants it with a plaintive acoustic guitar passage that initiates the next trip. 

If that doesn’t make you want to listen to his music, then you cannot be my friend.

Tibbetts was born in Madison, Wisconsin, but is based in St. Paul, Minnesota. His first two albums were created and self-released. Yr was the second, but the first one I had heard. We had a copy at WPRB that had Tibbetts’ original pen and ink drawing (see above) as the cover—and I vaguely recall that it might have been personalized for the station (although in retrospect, maybe not by Tibbetts).

Later, Yr was re-released, with a different cover, by ECM records, a legendary jazz label known for a particular sound, and for recording its albums quickly. Tibbetts’ first album for the label was done in this manner, and was not a critical success. His later works, done more in his painstaking, time consuming way, were more successful.

I have to admit that I basically lost track of Tibbetts after I left college. I don’t remember hearing that first ECM release, and it wasn’t like there was a place to hear his style of music on the radio, even in New York in the 1980s and 1990s. His output slowed significantly after the 80s, and even more so in the 2000s, with his last album, Natural Causes released in 2010. He has also released two albums with Chöying Drolma, a Tibetan Buddhist nun.

A few years ago, an Australian music site, Guvera, briefly was allowing free, legal, downloads of certain music using a system that allowed the amassing of a huge number of credits for essentially clicking on advertisements. I downloaded hundreds, maybe thousands, of songs during this brief period, which ultimately ended when Guvera decided that it would become a streaming service (probably, because giving away thousands of downloads wasn't a viable business model). It did allow me to download a bunch of Tibbetts’ later music, which all sounds pretty good, although I admittedly haven’t given it a huge amount of attention. And it never again blew my head up the same way it did when I first heard Yr.

Family Bands/ STE*: The Pointer Sisters

The Pointer Sisters: Little Pony

[purchase]

If you only know the Pointer Sisters from their run of hits in the 80s, Little Pony will come as a surprise. This is straight ahead jazz singing, and as good as it gets. It comes from their 1974 album That’s a Plenty, which is mostly a jazz album, but it also features their country hit Fairytale. Fairytale is also the real deal; the song, a Pointers original, was good enough to win a country Grammy and land them an appearance on the Grand Old Opry. They were the first black artists to appear there. By this point in their career, the sisters had also recorded funk and blues.

Can you imagine such a career on a major label today? It couldn’t happen. As much as anything else, the Pointers’ story is about how much the music industry has changed since then. The sisters had varied musical interests and the talent to do it all, but they must have been a marketer’s nightmare. Nowadays, they would be independent artists, possibly self produced. Certainly no major label would want to touch them until they “decided” what they were. But look at them in the video, and you see four women who are happiest not having to decide. They are having a blast, doing what they love.

By the 80s, the Pointers were under increasing pressure to go mainstream, and they did. Their talent was realized in a string of major hits, such as I’m So Excited and Slowhand. But there was a personal price. The group had four sisters at the beginning of the 80s, then three, then two. Much later, one of the sisters wanted to rejoin the group, but was not welcomed back. By the 90s, pop music had moved on, and there were no more hits. They returned to jazz to perform songs from the show Ain’t Misbhavin’ in 1995 and 1996, but June’s health was failing by then. She died in 2006, and since then the surviving three sisters have rarely performed together.

Even in the 80s, the Pointers showed some stylistic range, doing numbers with contemporary R&B, girl group, and rock flavors. But I can’t help wondering what might have happened if their diverse musical interests had continued to be encouraged in that period. Quincy Jones made it big producing Thriller for Michael Jackson, but he came from a jazz background. What might he have done with the Pointers? And what might have happened if they had worked with Prince or George Clinton? We will never know, but I can’t help thinking that the sisters might have been happier, even if they didn’t sell as many records.