On Miles Davis' 1966 release Miles Smiles, you hear the great man's voice as the trumpet fades away at the end of the gorgeous ballad "Circle", on side one. He must have been talking to producer Teo Macero; all you hear is his sandpaper whisper,"so how's it sound to you?". Course, if you want you could imagine he was talking to you, the listener: what do you think?
Richard Sinclair, late of Caravan Hatfield and The North, and Camel, is equally inviting; that may wéll be the meaning of this new release's title. What's different and what makes this essential is that with the first wistful chords of "What's Rattlin'?", he serves notice that he won't be held to past glorioskies; in fact he's on his way to a new and sinuously subtle meld of jazz, ethnic, rock and that undefinably willful indifference to Newtonian physics that apparently can only be found in the Canterbury Trapezoid (as opposed to the Bermuda Triangle,no doubt). Good-natured as ever, he squires Hugh Hopper, Pip Pyle, Dave Cohen (who is responsible for most of the breathtaking percussion here; he could have sat in for Tony Williams in the Davis quintet!), Didier Malherbe, Kit Watkins and a few other transposed heads through an ear-opening slipstream of twists, turns and sunny sentiments (your odd caveat about the environment or war notwithstanding),altogether coming up with the single most mature statement I've yet heard from a musician of any stripe in years. No kidding.
Our music (rock music, anyway) is at bottom an adolescent form (some would say infantile). And delightful though they were, Caravan, the Hatfields, National Health and Soft Machine, ad absurdum, all had a bit of the clever show-off to them. "Look at us!", however, is no longer in Mr. Sinclair's vocabulary (it was well on the wane in his fine 1992 release Caravan Of Dreams, but our Abdab in Chief was too muleheaded to notice). Six of the ten compositions here are instrumental, and the simple intensity of the enterprise will make one delirious. Sax-and-flautists Malherbe and Jimmy Hastings add marvelous spice on their respective tracks, and Hugh Hopper, the most fearsome electric bassist of the 1970s, now lets one artfully bent note stand for the roar he used to let go. Freed of holding the bottom down, Sinclair gets to toss off some guitar solos, angular and spiky breaks that remind somewhat of Phil Miller.
The classic humor remains in bits like "Where Are They Now?", an ECM-like guitars/drums workout in which it seems the missing musicians are the subject. "Over From Dover" features Sinclair scatting a lush samba melody while the remaining members frolic in the palm trees, while "Out Of The Shadows" takes any number of Salman Rushdie-hairpin turns in its 12 minutes. "Outback In Canterbury"is also remarkable in that a tortoise-sized dijeridu is added just to muck things up. No, forget your pigeonholes. Just call it Sinclair. And friends.
"Videos" does allow our hero to gibber incredibles about the lengths artists will go to in order to force their listeners to indulge in one's product, but the dearth of the usual Sinclair moments (as well as what they're replaced with) point to how he is grateful of our company, but we must let him get on with something new. You have to draw another like ness to Miles here; perfectionist that he was, and Sinclair no doubt is, neither one would ask what you think unless they already knew it was as good as it gets.
© 1994 Tone Clusters