MIKE NOCK — Almanac (with Bennie Maupin / Cecil McBee / Eddie Marshall) (review)

MIKE NOCK — Almanac (with Bennie Maupin / Cecil McBee / Eddie Marshall) album cover Live album · 1977 · Post Bop Buy this album from MMA partners
3/5 ·
Sean Trane
I fell upon this Nock album when looking in my library system’s Bennie Maupin section, and to be honest, I tend to think it wasn’t necessarily misfiled (well Maupin was not yet a household name in 67 either); despite the fact that six of the seven tracks are written by the Kiwi pianist, but oddly enough the title track being from Maupin. Coming with an avant-garde artwork (looks like a 00’s sleeve) that fits rather well the advanced music that sits on the slice of wax. The quartet is made from the afore-mentioned Nock and Maupin, but also McBee (from Pharoah’s band) on bass and Marshall on drums.

The album opens on the delightful and thoughtful rather avant-garde of Specific Gravity Time, where Maupin’s flute haunts you in your sleep. The following Symbiosis is maybe un-aptly named so, because Maupin’s sax obviously did not get along with the mike it was spitting at and saturating it. Indeed, the sax’s fuzzy lines are accidental and obviously never fixed afterwards. But it’s a cool track anyway. Emotivations is a piano-led piece that tends to push the boundaries a bit, as opposed to the flipside’s Maupin-penned Almanac that seems content on displaying bop music. Hallucinogen is indeed a bit hypnotic with its demented piano, underlined by McBee’s bowed bass and no wind instruments - this is a Nock album after all. Double Split is a rather uninteresting boppy-standardy jazz that proliferated during these pre-electric revolution years, while the forced hard-boppism of Dudley closes the album in a mitigated way.

A rather short and schizophrenic album, where the first side seems to lie almost a decade ahead of its flipside. While Kiwi Mike Nock s not exactly a prolific composer or album releaser, I was kind of surprised that he was even around in the 60’s, and often quite ahead of the pack, given this album’s A-side.

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