Soft Machine - Fourth (1971)

Steve:

Thank goodness for the CD age. As I've mentioned elsewhere on this blog, I was a Camel fan at a very early age, so when Camel albums first became available on CD, I got a few right off the bat. One of the great things about many CD reissues back then was the liner notes, which gave me some history behind the band and the album that I did not otherwise have the means to learn. This was still pre-Internet, so all I knew about Camel was provided by the LP sleeves and the weak writeup in the Rolling Stone Record Guide. I believe it was in the booklet of The Snow Goose CD on Deram that I first saw mention of "the Canterbury Scene". Camel had a link to this scene by virtue of bassist/vocalist Richard Sinclair, who played with Camel for just two short years but still left an indelible mark on the band's history. The CD booklet went on to mention several other Canterbury Scene bands, including Soft Machine, one of the bands central to the whole "Canterbury" thing.

Armed with this new knowledge, my next record store trips were focused on finding releases by these Canterbury artists. Two of my first purchases (on the same day, as I recall) were In the Land of Grey and Pink by Caravan (featuring the aforementioned Richard Sinclair) and Fourth by Soft Machine. While the Caravan album was very much what I expected and had hoped to hear (helped by Sinclair's presence, no doubt), the Soft Machine album was more of a surprise. Essentially, it is a hardcore progressive electric jazz album - something that was not in my wheelhouse at the time. Elton Dean's free-blowing saxophone dominates several of the pieces, and although Robert Wyatt, the lovably whimsical vocalist I'd heard about, is present, there are no vocals on the album as he sticks to playing drums here. Wyatt would leave the band after this album, and his adventures subsequent to Soft Machine are well worth exploring. 

Despite my initial "huh?", I kept listening to this album, gradually understanding and internalizing it, and within a year or so I had collected all of their first six albums. In retrospect, I think this album may have been the first time a jazz album clicked with me - I know every note on it, and it all makes sense to me. Since then, Soft Machine has become one of my favorite groups of all time (even top 5, dare I say), and this album is where it all started. What's more, I've developed a deep affection for all of the Soft Machine albums, even though the band's direction and personnel were always in constant flux, to the point that by their seventh album, keyboardist Mike Ratledge was the only original member left. I attribute their continuity to an overriding "guiding principle" that seems to hover over the band, no matter who is in it. 

I understand that music like this owes a huge debt to the originators of electric jazz - Miles Davis, Weather Report, etc. But bands like Soft Machine still brought something to the table that those guys didn't or couldn't. Alhough they had developed some pretty good jazz chops, they were in essence a rock band playing jazz, not vice versa. This difference manifests in a bit more of a raw edge to their playing - whether it's a particularly ramshackle drum fill by Wyatt, or Ratledge going for a little extra distortion on his organ freakout, or bassist Hugh Hopper cranking up the fuzz. There's a rock energy here that I really responded to in my rock-centric youth.

Dan:

I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Steve had gotten into the Softs because I don't recall ever playing their albums while he was young. I added Third and Fourth to my collection within a few years of their releases (1970 and 1971). I came to them as a jazz lover, having read rave reviews in the jazz press. The early 70s were challenging times for jazz heads like me, but I thought I would "get with the times" and not wait for the resurrection of John Coltrane. I was impressed by this adventurous band of Brits who clearly knew how to play and, as Steve notes, felt like a rock band too. Elton Dean had solid jazz credentials, as demonstrated on two of his jazz albums in my collection: a quartet session (All the Tradition, 1990) and a large band (Newsense,1998). But those jazz albums do not resemble the wonderful world of Soft Machine.