ELTON DEAN — Oh! For the Edge (Elton Dean's Ninesense) (review)

ELTON DEAN — Oh! For the Edge (Elton Dean's Ninesense) album cover Live album · 1976 · Avant-Garde Jazz Buy this album from MMA partners
3/5 ·
Sean Trane
Well, Elton has always presented his Ninesense group as the spiritual successor of the early 70’s Keith tippet Group that had produced two solid JR/F albums, but this writer prefers to think more of a mix of the KTG and South-African laced Brotherhood Of Breath, despite the presence of the former band’s leader and the absence of the latter band’s leader (McGregor). Indeed, many of the participants (if not all) came from those two formations, even if the South-African contingent will be reduced over time, with Feza’s untimely death and Malfatti’s departure (after this album), replaced by Harry Beckett and Nick Evans. Their first album saw the mood a rather standard or boppy mood and to be honest, Dean’s spiritual inspiration is quite far-fetched when thinking of either KTG or BoB.

The opening 9-mins Dance is a typical apercu of the band’s overall spectrum, going from fairly standard to fusion and all the way to dissonant avant-garde, partly due to Tippett’s crazy piano. Keith’s slow piano opens Fall In Free, the piece being somewhat conservative, but there are some killer brass interventions and chorus. The 9-mins Forsoothe is probably as close to the KTG’s soundscape as it gets on this debut album, and it is their more adventurous of the album, as the band stretches itself into dissonant territories, while remaining accessible. The 2-mins MT piece is also a fine composition; but the Bluesy Friday Night is a welcome change of pace, despite being a bit too conventional for the rest of the album. The closing slow almost-liturgical Prayer For Jesus is also a fairly Dean composition, and thankfully, it doesn’t overstay its welcome.

Ninesense’s first album is not exactly what I would cal; a scorching JR/F album like the two KTG albums that it pretends being the spiritual predecessor, but a rather more conventional jazz album that sometimes stretches to dissonant moments. A relative duisappointment when ones knows Elton’s other works in that 70’s decade.
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