Customer Reviews

Electric Bath

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When trumpeter-composer-arranger-bandleader Don Ellis and his 21-piece assault force stepped on stage at the '65 Monterey Jazz Festival, they dragged the big band format into the modern era. The golden age of big bands, roughly framed by World War II, was well over. Duke Ellington and Count Basie, though active, were simply refining a style perfected years before.

Young Turks like Buddy Rich and Maynard Ferguson, with whom Ellis apprenticed, reinvigorated the format but did not reinvent it. Their modernized spin on big band jazz will forever be defined, sadly, by the unmistakably slick, processed delivery of Johnny Carson's Tonight Show orchestra. Outside the walls there was a musical revolution going on; Ellis and crew were first to hit the street and help storm the barricades.

Electric Bath, recorded in 1967, showcased a relentless creativity which, when combined with precision playing and unbelievable energy levels, delivered something totally new - and wild. The Ellis Orchestra fused rock with jazz, boasted truly bizarre and technically dazzling time signatures, introduced exotic musical influences that added an otherworldly quality, and played with joyful exuberance. Ellis could show off with the best of them, using a four-valve trumpet to split notes into quartertones, bending and teasing with the panache of a rock guitarist.

The Don Ellis Orchestra was masterful at making the most of dynamics; they went from poignant, soft, and gentle to hurricane velocity with effortless ease. As a bandleader, Ellis was exacting, he had to be, when you've got 21 guys playing in 19/4 time there's little margin for error. In this regard, Ellis was a marvelous anomaly; he combined the fearless experimentation of the late 60's with a rigorous discipline conspicuously absent from most of what was in the air back then.

Discovering a more scintillating, groundbreaking CD than Electric Bath by The Don Ellis Orchestra is certainly possible, but far from easy. It is perhaps a notch below Tears Of Joy, the DEO 2-CD masterwork. But comparing the two is rather like asking which is the better Vermeer, View Of Delft or Girl With A Pearl Earring? Once you've hit that level of quality, who cares?

Back in the late 60's I toiled as a youth at an FM station (nobody listened to FM back then children) and played all kinds of music...Sandwiched in between the Carpenters and Andy Williams we would slid in some jazz cuts...(Even the owners were not tuned in)...I was intrigued by the cover of a Columbia lp, Electric Bath by Don Ellis...Not knowing what was in store for my ears, I plopped it on the turntable and fired it up in the cue mode...Damn, it knocked my brain cells for a loop and made my toes curl...Here was something truly different and mighty special..Open Beauty...Turkish Bath...New Horizons...Indian Lady...Time meters I had never heard...Harmonies that were new...Don Ellis was at his top form when he recorded this album back in '68...You listen and you'll be hooked...If you've never heard Mr. Ellis and you like good jazz and big bands, give Electric Bath some room on your shelf...This needs to be in your collection...I know you'll experience what I felt way, way back in a time nearly forgotten...Don Ellis...An American musical genius...But we knew that back then...Enjoy!

I was fortunate enough to see Don Ellis and band twice(!) during the early 'seventies at the Everett Civic Auditorium (Everett, WA) just after the release of the "Live at Fillmore" double album set. It turned me inside-out, even to this day. Almost weekly I check to see if the "Fillmore" album has FINALLY been released on CD, but so far no go. Until then I have snatched up every Don Ellis CD I can find, including the fanatstic Electric Bath. Those who 'know' Don Ellis are nothing short of Chosen People. Please, please: more Don Ellis releases!

Electric Bath (1967), which was nominated for a Grammy award and also earned an "Album of the Year" award from Down Beat magazine, quickly became Ellis's most popular release to date. The recording was Ellis's first studio album with his orchestra and also his first on the Columbia label. The 5/4 "Indian Lady," from the Electric Bath session, features passages of Indian-inspired textures and became a fan favorite. A shortened version was released as a single. Another selection on the recording, titled "Open Beauty," features psychedelic webs of electronic effects, including creative trumpet improvisation by Ellis utilizing an echoplex tape-loop.

The studio environment of Electric Bath provided Ellis the ability to control every aspect of the recording. This control resulted in a more sophisticated production and tighter performances than that of his first two live recordings. Regarding Electric Bath, Henry Mancini commented, "My rock-oriented teenage son, Chris, and I have both flipped out over Don Ellis's new band. Anyone who can reach these two opposite poles at once must be reckoned with and listened to."

Of the same recording, noted jazz critic, Digby Diehl, commented in the liner notes:

"Conceive, if you can, an aural collage created by the Beatles, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Ravi Shankar and Leonard Feather's Encyclopedia of Jazz. And then, imagine that creation churning through the high-powered talents of twenty-one young musicians, like a rumble before you open the door of a blast furnace. Electric Bath runs this scope of ideas and intensity [ . . . ] Don's use of a funky 7/4 or a blues in 5 gives us a delightfully renewed sense of tension in rhythm. New tempos change our awareness of accents, break down the cliché phrases based on 2/4 or 4/4, and [ . . . ] make us listen in very real natural extensions of a modern musical conception. The Don Ellis Band has no academic hang-ups about its music - it just radiates good vibrations in a refreshing contemporary idiom."

You like fusion, baby? How about post 1950-jazz? Is progressive rock more your slice of baklava? Yes? Well then, Electric Bath is a must have, no matter which label floats your boat.

Just as Zappa was mixing modern classical, blues, rock and jazz, knowing these labels are false distinctions, Ellis got the same impulse, plus a few horns.

The opener, Indian Lady, is blues with a mad scientist time signature. "Turkish Bath" sticks with this genre, but with an Mediterainian groove and layers of electric keyboards. The band is sophisticated, complex and cerebral, but they ROCK OUT!

"Open Beauty" is one. The keybord plays a floting line while Ellis has a play with his trumpet and eccho effects. The piece is complete expermentation. Intellectually rigourous and vicerally gorgous. A complete origonal.

"New Horrizons" has a challanging melody and works like a suite. It plays with the possibilities the rest of "Electric Bath" lays out. It is the least accessible piece here. But, like the whole album, once beneath your skin, it stays.

Like Zappa, Ellis was a true maveric. He got what he needed from every kind of music that touched him, and balled it into something new. Old folks at the jazz fest and kids at the Filmore ate it up. Absolutlely, an Electric Bath.

I was 15 when I saw the PBS "Live at Wolftrap" featuring the Don Ellis Orchestra. I was floored. I didn't know that anything like that was possible to be written, much less played!

I went out and got Electric Bath, Goes Underground and Fillmore. I got tickets to see the band at Alice Tully Hall for the release of Tears of Joy. There were more people in the band than the audience. On their last song the whole band came out into the audience and played. It was truly an overwhelming musical experience. Actually it ruined any hope I may have had to play saxophone professionally. That's the stuff I could only dream about playing.

Where's the rest of the catalogue?

This is a fine effort from Ellis. But some of his later work is even better -- Live at Fillmore and Tears of Joy, for example. How 'bout a re-release? I saw Ellis live three times doing tunes from these albums (including Electric Bath) and haven't seen a performance by anyone since with such energy. Man, this guy could write AND play!

I was initially introduced to Ellis on the "Live From Monterey" closing tune, "Niner Two." It was that song that let me know that he was BOTH mainstream AND ahead of his time .... right ??

Think about this: Ellis' Monterey stint PRECEDED Miles' "Bitches Brew" by two years, right? And by the time of the Monterey set, Ellis had not merely explored, but pretty much MASTERED his use of the four-valve electric trumpet he invented .... compared to this, why is Bitches Brew considered so revolutionary?

My "answer" -- Ellis died a few years after the hight of his career, where Miles lived decades after Bitches Brew. When Miles' electric music first came out, the world didn't know what to think of it (I was still a fetus, so I wasn't there). But the linemen of Bitches Brew went on to pursue their careers, and form other groups, while Ellis laid in his grave.

My point is, this album, "Electric Bath," is the bastard crown saint of new-free-electric jazz, and hence helped to form what we know as Rock (and Rap) today.

Truly worth the time you have spent listening to Bitches Brew. Truly.

Of course, "Bath" -- like "Bitches" -- may take several listenings before appreciation sets in. But definitely worth your labor !!

This is one the the most creative recordings of its time and shows the Ellis band at its best. The odd meters and creative quarter-pitch tunings are more than just gimmicks. Here's hoping that we can soon find his "Connections" or "Live at Fillmore" in CD format.

Don Ellis set the pattern for Progressive Jazz 30 years, and while some may have improved on his start, no one has ever done it better. This album was, in my humble opinion, his bery best.

Electric Bath can take you to the heights. The 1/4 tones Don evokes from his 4-valve coronet are unlike anything your have ever heard. Music synthasizers can form any note, but can never come close to the pure sound flowing like liquid gold from the bell of his instrument.

To keep this simple, " Try it- You'll love it!"