Price paid: £10 (Peckham Soul).

I’ll confess, I was hesitant about dropping a full tenner on a common-or-garden ‘70s Atlantic LP in less-than-stellar condition, but the recently opened Peckham Soul record shop (‘round the side of the Bussey Building for any South-East Londoners in the audience) has a really nice atmosphere, and I didn’t want to leave without buying something .

Several factors caused me to zero in on this particular platter by smooth jazz flute overlord Herbie Mann. Firstly, the track times. 8:52, 10:42? Nice. Having spent the past few years digging deep into Isaac Hayes’s similarly expansive productions of the era, the idea of hearing a crack team of Stax/Atlantic session guys stretching out across semi-side long jams on stuff like ‘Chain of Fools’ and ‘Hold On I’m Coming’ is an extremely pleasing one to me, irrespective of whatever Mr Mann happens to be getting up to over the top of ‘em.

Secondly, a cursory glance at the featured players pretty much ker-chinged up the “SOLD” bar on my internal cash register. Roy Ayers and Sonny Sharrock on the same session? *sharp intake of breath* Nuff said. Larry Coryell? Isn’t he that goofy muso-fusion guitar guy who looks kind of like a wigged out Hank Marvin? Well, I don’t know much about all that, but as regular readers will be aware, I don’t think I’ve ever actually been able to even conceive of the idea of a record with too many guitarists on it, so hey, why not.

And finally, that great photo of the band in the studio on the back cover pretty much propelled me directly toward the very friendly Peckham Soul man’s external cash register, and the deal was done. And, in short, I’m very happy it was done, because ‘Memphis Underground’ is fucking brilliant.

The title track on the A side kicks things off pretty much as I hoped it would, with the band (credited here as “the Memphis rhythm section”, in that old fashioned use of the term that includes electric piano, organ and rhythm guitar) delivering a nice, almost Bobbie Gentry-ish country-soul feel, over which Mann gets stuck into some of his mellifluous, bird-songy magic.

Truth be told, I’ve always liked a bit of jazz flute, so ergo, I like Herbie Mann, a chap so supremely in control of his eminently pleasant art that one imagines a renegade surgeon could sneak into the studio and cut his feet off mid-solo, and still he wouldn’t drop a note that was anything less than an agreeably melodic, harmonically appropriate addition to what the backing band is playing at any given moment.

Free-ranging variations on a central riff is the name of the game here, with gentle touches of fuzz creeping across the background – courtesy of Coryell, I’m assuming. Upping the ante slightly, he proceeds to drop some swampy washes of overdriven sustain into his otherwise controlled, ballroom rock-styled solo spot, before Ayers exorcises this minimal quantity of menace with a few bars of his transcendently nice vibe tinkling. A few errant bits of feedback can be heard as the boss man swings back in round things off, but Sharrock seems to be keeping his powder dry for now.

After a transitional ‘New Orleans’ (rhythm on this is great (that bass!), but I recall little else, even after 10+ listens), ‘Hold On I’m Coming’ is where things get really good – I mean, really, REALLY good.

Imagine a tightly drilled band of pros running through those choppy, hard-riffing verses and hair-raisingly thrilling horn blasts again and again and again. Sounds pretty good, right? Indeed, I could probably just listen to that for eight (or indeed, eighty) minutes and feel entirely happy with my place in the universe, but wait up, here come our featured players, stepping up one by one in a delightfully well-mannered, old school jazz type fashion.

First spot of course goes to our esteemed band leader, shifting into higher gear to match the more energised nature of the track (would it even be POSSIBLE to make this particular composition sound “laidback”?). At one point, he drops a dazzling tangle of sweetly, salubrious confusion over a kick-ass break from drummer Gene Christman, and the moment when the rest of the band comes back in, organist Bobby Wood hitting this kind of unbelievably-fucking-funky low-end thrum on the far end of his keyboard, is just so damn cool.

Next up is Coryell, again wrangling a thick yet mannered fuzz-tone for a series of careful, gimlet-eyed ‘psychedelic cowboy’ type licks. Simple, restrained but stone-cold class, it reminds me (both in terms of tone and content) of some of the lead playing on Creedence’s early albums. Great stuff.

Cue Roy Ayers, wielding his mallets with a level of intensity pretty much unheard of in his usual chilled out universe.

By now, we’re about five minutes in, already cookin’ like… hell, I dunno, insert your own overblown chef/kitchen metaphor here… as the stirring spoon passes to Sonny Sharrock, who promptly bites it in two and spews splinters into the heavens. Friends, I can’t even tell you how exhilarating it is to be listening to an extended jam in this general vein, and to hear a kamikaze guitarist crash in with a hurricane of full bore, slide n’ scrape, screwdriver-under-the-strings dissonance that wouldn’t sound out of place on an early Sonic Youth bootleg.

Presumably Sonny was at the mercy of the session engineers here, so he’s pretty much clean-toned, unable to harness the rich, distorted overtones that characterise his best-known solo work, but still, he’s ridin’ bareback across the fretboard like an out of control dodgem car running a suicide mission through the Kentucky derby, and it’s amazing, particularly when the rest of the featured players return for the track’s conclusion, sliding in around the maelstrom he’s kicking up with a new level of joyous abandon. Wow.

I realise that some readers might be finding my prolonged muso reveries here pretty insufferable and/or ludicrous, but seriously, this on of the most monumentally satisfying pieces of music I’ve heard in ages, and I would urge you to make it part of your life by any means necessary.

Nothing on the B can quite equal this scorcher, but the expanded rhythm section certainly excel themselves on ‘Chain of Fools’. Both bass and drums are, uh - ‘right on the money’, I believe is the terminology – and we get another welcome blast of both Coryell’s sweet swamp-fuzz and Ayers’ tiptoeing through the tuned steel tulips, too. Having taken he roof off the joint on the preceding cut meanwhile, Sharrock seems to have collected his cheque and dragged his amp back to the station, leaving these other fools to it.

(Actually, Sharrock seems to have played extensively with Mann, appearing on no less than *nine* LPs released between ’68 and ’71, as well as touring as part of his band (thanks, Wikipedia). Were ALL his spots on Herbie’s records this incendiary? If so, I’ve got some digging to do. I don’t really know the history here, but I’d be fascinated to know whether the two men – icons of melodicism and dissonance, respectively – shared a genuine musical / personal bond, or whether Sharrock just took on this work as a paying gig, keeping it at arms length from his own, considerably more challenging, music.)

The decision to end ‘Memphis Underground’ with a version of ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’ (you know, “glory, glory hallelujah” etc) is certainly a weird one. Largely a Mann solo excursion of subdued and melancholic character, gradually blossoming into sunnier and funkier territory as it goes on, the reclamation of this bulwark of white, American historical chest-beating within the context of the multi-racial, genre-blending gumbo of this LP adds a certain, strange political tension to proceedings, and it was this spirit that likely accounts for the fact that ‘Memphis Underground’ was repeatedly cited by the late Dr. Hunter S. Thompson as one of his favourite albums.

I was unaware of this factoid when I purchased the record, but as a lifelong admirer of the Good Doctor’s writing, I’m happy to find myself inadvertently following in his footsteps - just as, in fact, more or less every single thing about this album makes me happy. If you’re looking for the dictionary definition of a keeper, here ya go.

‘Memphis Underground’ by Herbie Mann gets a big THUMBS UP.

Labels: album reviews, Herbie Mann, Larry Coryell, old LPs, Roy Ayers, Sonny Sharrock