Customer Reviews

Air Cut (Dig)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

For their first three albums (Air Conditioning, Second Album, Phantasmagoria), the band kept a rather steady lineup, with Sonja Kristina, Francis Monkman, Darryl Way, and Florian Pilkington-Miksa. It was only the bassists the band was going through, as each of these three albums had a different bassist. By the time of their third album, they were on to Mike Wedgwood, who would later become a member of Caravan in the mid '70s (Cunning Stunts, Blind Dog at St. Dunstans). After Phantasmagoria, the band witnessed their biggest lineup change, with Florian Pilkington-Miksa, Francis Monkman, and Darryl Way gone. Mike Wedgwood decided to stay, and in comes two teenagers, a guitarist who simply gone by the name of Kirby (apparently briefly in Fleetwood Mac when Danny Kirwan left and before Bob Weston and Dave Walker came in) and a violinist and keyboardist named Eddie Jobson who would find even greater fame (Roxy Music, UK, Jethro Tull). New drummer was Jim Russell. We all know what lineup changes can do: a. make it obvious the band's best days are now behind them because they don't seem to have the same spirit or inspiration as previous members or simply clueless, or the band wanted new members to ride on what new musical fad was at the time, or in the case of Genesis, get rid of musicians to ride on newer pop fads b. not affect the quality of their music or c. greatly improve the band. Of course people are most happy with "b" and "c", the "c" has plenty of examples, like Yes or Genesis, realizing they needed better and more versatile musicians (i.e. Steve Howe, Rick Wakeman, Steve Hackett, Phil Collins) and those bands did improve greatly when they acquired such musicians in to such bands. Curved Air falls in the category "b", it didn't hurt the band, though there isn't really any improvement to anything they did before, at least the band still made great music with this new lineup.

While it seems like adding teenagers to the band might seem like a stunt for the band to attract a younger audience, upon listening to Air Cut, you know right away that's not the case at all, as they were both fully capable and professional musicians. I thought it was really nice to see Curved Air get a full-time guitarist, and Eddie Jobson was now doing the duties that both Francis Monkman and Darryl Way previously done. While I wasn't exactly happy with Jobson's much more modern keyboard setup with UK and Jethro Tull, here in Curved Air, he used great classic analog keyboards: VCS-3, ARP 2600, harpsichord, and most of all the Mellotron, which is used on some of the cuts! I only wished he retained those keyboards for UK and even Jethro Tull.

It's nice to see Curved Air still sticking to the symphonic prog that they do so well, with the voice of Sonja Kristina still delivering the goods. Sonja isn't the only one doing the vocals, Mike Wedgwood also does some vocals, but does not bear much resemblance to Cunning Stunts (I never felt that album was one of Caravan's better albums), for those fearing. Though I prefer Second Album and Phantasmagoria over this one, this one is still worth having.

17 year old keyboard wizard eddie jobson plays his ass off here. Then he went to play in roxy music, Zappa, UK and Tull. Some say this is one of Curved air?s more prog albums.

Beautiful package from Repetoire. Eddie Jobson later joined UK.
I'm sure many people have been looking for this album on CD and it's worth the wait. Metamorphosis joins other classic long (>10 minutes) progressive cuts from the seventies from giants like Yes, Renaissance and the Move

The story of Curved Air is important to Air Cut, and it started with budding classical musicians Francis Monkman (keys, guitar) and Darryl Way (violin, keys) teaming up with Sonja Kristina (vocals) and ace drummer Florian Pilkington-Miksa of the glass family fame, plus Ian Eyre on bass, to form one of the first classical rock bands. And in the face of a lot of scepticism, they were actually pretty good, both on record and live. The first LP, a picture disc called Air Conditioning sold well and was followed by CA Two, also a top seller and full of fabulous tunes. The third, Phantasmagoria, was met by very mixed reviews and indiffrent sales (for the time) and introduced Mike Wedgwood on bass, fresh from The Overlanders and The Nicky James Band. Apart from bass, though, Wedgwood, a relation of Josiah Wedgwood, the potter, Charles Darwin and Ralph Vaughan Williams, had a perfect-pitch voice, could play guitar, sax, clarinet, drums and keyboards very well and could also score for a full orchestra if needed. He also happens to be my son's Godfather.

However, after citing musical diffrences and the usual, Darryl, Francis and Florian all left after Phantasmagoria leaving ..... Sonja and Mike. Surprisingly, they decided to soldier and and went recruiting, and what they recruited was this: Eddie Jobson, aged 17, ex-Fat Grapple, on keyboards and violin, Kirby (Gregory), ex Armada, on guitar, and Jim Russell on kit. This bought the average age of the band to about 21. What nobody quite twigged, even then, was that Eddie was actually a genuine fully signed-up musical genius. And off they went to record the fourth album for Warners, Air Cut. And it was and is an absolute cracker.

Much punchier than its predecessors, it nonetheless had their extraordinary musicality and flair. There are some fantastic highlights, but I have to mention Eddie's epic "Metamorphosis", starting with a lovely piano solo, seguing into bass, drums, volume control guitar and then into a killer riff and a lovely song. It goes on for about three and a half days and is absolutely brilliant. All the band play like folk possesed and Eddie's musicianship and playing skills at that age are just, well, unbelievable, actually. Mike's "2 - 3 - 2" is a powerhouse rocker with a massive solo from Kirby on his Dan Armstrong perspex guitar, "Easy" is a bitter-sweet but frightening ballad rocker with Mike and Sonja sharing vocals, "Elfin Boy" is a soft and sad tribute to her son from Sonja, "Armin" is a blazer with cracking violin and guitar from Eddie and Kirby, and the whole brew powered by Jim Russell's power drumming, which, just very occasionally, is not quite in synch, but this is nit-picking. Other tracks display all these qualities and the playing throughout is superb. This is a lost masterpiece, and it is rumoured that WB lost the masters.

Equally important is that they were just mind-blowingly good on stage. This bunch of kids, basically, used to blow concert halls apart and I saw one performance at the old Finsbury Park Rainbow that still sticks in my mind as one of the best rock shows I ever saw. Eddie had to play Darryl's classic cod violin piece "Vivaldi" but he did it without five minutes of arpeggio screeching, Praise Be. What a performer, equally at ease on silver/perspex violins, grand and electric pianos and also the pretty primitive synthesizers of the day.

Sonja is still on the road, Mike plays and works in Denmark after a productive spell with Caravan, Kirby works in rehabilitation, Jim, I know not, and Eddie went on to add spine and quality to Roxy music, and on to Zappa, Jethro Tull, UK, and later musical director for Nash Bridges.

This CD release should be trumpeted from the hilltops. It is a one-off from an incredibly talented and musical ensemble and thank goodness they stayed together long enough to produce this fantastic fresh-as-new recording. Indispensible proof of the quality of some of this decade.

Brilliant.

PS I have just seen that a late-night recording of Let It Be by Mike, Eddie and me has surfaced on the www. We did it for fun after one of the Finsbury Park Rainbow gigs.

And what do we have to cheer us up now? Fall out Boy. O tempora, o mores...

The music here, and in particular Jobson's prodigy-level contributions, should already be known to you. While the notes here claim that Curved Air was the Very First Group to employ classical techniques, the claim is simply and blatantly untrue. By the time CA's first album was released in 1970, The Nice, The Moody Blues and others had, with varying degrees of success, already delivered a fairly weighty load of the occasionally brilliant, occasionally oddly misshapen hybrids. As for the fury that Darryl Way unleashed, don't forget High Tide. The line-up they used for their 1969 album "Sea Shanties" proves to be a defining one. And, not to take anything away from Curved Air, I'd argue that even The Beatles' "Eleanor Rigby" should be considered as one of the early successes of the category.

So instead of adding to the adoration of the music, I'd just like to comment on Chris Welch's notes to this reissue. Setting the first place claim for CA aside, he does an excellent job of giving us the shorthand history of the group. But here's what's so disappointing. It turns out to be that same-old, same-old break-up story. The now boilerplate gobbledygook about disagreements on "presentation" and "direction" that always seems to be lurking in the background, ready to tear up one worthwhile group or another, despite all their songs about love and gettin' it together. And now that we all get to plumb our early listening years with greater historical and audio detail as well as first-person accounts, the unbearable weight of egos keeps coming up from behind to rob artists and audiences of what woulda, coulda, shoulda been.

As evidenced by the music on "Air Cut", it's too bad that Curved Air the band wasn't as different as their music was from all those others that collapsed due to mostly subjective problems. If they had been, they might have seen far enough beyond the squabbles to stick to the work right there in front of them. Perhaps their recent reunion was an acknowledgment of the fact that things weren't all that bad between them after all. Too bad then, about all those years in between...

I entirely agree with Kerry Liemar that CA, for all their merits, were not the progenitors( and neither were the embarrassing Genesis in at the genesis) of classical/ progressive rock.They weren't anywhere near that place and it was the likes of The Nice and the Moody Blues who can claim that 'honour'.

I first encountered CA as a 14 year old schoolboy who was bowled over visually by Sonja Kristina, and aurally by the boys whose musicianship could not be faulted.

After a gap of nearly 40 years,they came to my attention again when I was handed a flyer for their forthcoming 100 Club gig. On the back of that, I bought Retrospective to reassure myself that they really were as good as I remembered ( the past has a way of being capricious and playing tricks with what you had thought for all these years was the touchstone).CA were not as I remembered them: they were immeasurably better. The nearest I can get to an explanation as to why they were not commercially more successful is that Sonja was - and no doubt still is - so horny that CA couldn't be taken seriously by some. The snobbery of 'heads' was such that anything susceptible to easy understanding and appreciation was immediately suspect and passed over in favour of an album cover so obscure that you didn't always know what the hell you got.That didn't matter, though : the purpose was to flaunt the obscurity and tell anyone who asked that you had followed the band ( the word 'group'had no place for the progressives ) for 5 years or more and were now concernd that they were becoming too commercial and selling out.

And Sonja was so easy to appreciate.

40 years ago it never occurred to me that CA were particularly exemplars of progressive music. I would define the early years of prog rock as being the sort of music you could only find if you listened to radio shows hosted by John Peel, Bob Harris,Alan Black or Alan Freeman. The later years were characterised by ludicrously over - bloated nonsense that could not be replicated on stage. Not that this worried them a jot: they simply hired a few national orchestras and crammed them onto a stage already groaning under the weight of stacks of amps that would have been more use at Woodstock.

Rant over.There is nothing per se wrong with progressive rock. It is the company you kept that was the problem eg bands who felt that a week rummaging through the dictionary to find a word like 'topographical' was worth it.

At a tangent, CA remind me very much of Trees : or vice versa. Anyone who likes CA will almost certainly feel the same about Trees who, so far as I know, didn't enjoy much success but, for better or worse, were not labelled 'progressive'.

See you at the 100 Club.

I've heard underrated bands before, and I've heard critically underrated ones. Curved Air definitely falls in the second category. You have a female singer who's absolutely great in all areas, in terms of sound and her ability to capture our ears with her exceptionally pretty voice. Then you have these wild, creative musical arrangements that floor me every time. Air Cut might be the bands shining moment. The classical influences are obvious and believable, and the vocal melodies please me every time as well. It's almost hard to believe they are in fact a rock band. A band that never got the recognition they honestly deserve.

The best classic rock song of the 70s -- and maybe all time -- is Metamorphosis. It has everything from driving rock to classical atmospherics and it morphs so well from one to the other. A song that lives up to its name.

Metamorphosis used to be a favorite late-night cut on FM Radio in Cleveland. Often played in a set with ELP, Genesis, Gentle Giant and Yes.

The rest of the album is good, but not great. Yet, that one song...

I've been waiting for this album to be released on CD for as long as there have been CDs. Curved Air is one of progressive rock's most underrated bands, and Air Cut their long lost jewel.

Thank you Repertoire for releasing this on CD.