Seven For Lee
Millennium Jumble
Baker’s Treat
A Cannery Catastrophe
The Unbelievable Truth
Cunnimingus Redux
The Basho Variations
Elton Dean (saxello, alto sax)
Laurent Delchambre (drums & percussion)
Fred Delplancq (tenor sax)
Michel Delville (guitar, voice)
Jean-Paul Estiévenart (trumpet)
Damien Polard (bass)
Recorded live at Glaz’Art, Paris, October
2005
Elton Dean, ex Soft Machine,
died in February 2006. Four months earlier,
still playing with resilience and brilliance,
he recorded a set with The Wrong Object in
Paris. They’d never worked together before,
though the band had independently rehearsed
some of Dean’s charts and Dean, in his turn,
had independently worked on some of the band’s
– mainly the work of Michel Delville.
There’s plenty variety in
the sixty-eight minutes that constitute The
Unbelievable Truth. Dean’s Seven for Lee
finds the altoist spinning constant, endless
patterns over the band’s tightly knit rhythm
section – in which guitarist Delville has
been well mixed into the balance. Trumpeter
Jean-Paul Estiévenart plays with punchy,
full toned bravura. There are strong echoes
of Dean’s Jazz-Rock days in Millennium
Jumble where the funky guitar distortion
has c.1968 written all over it. Still the
groove is powerful though it’s possibly the
least successful track. By contrast Dean’s
work on his own punning composition Baker’s
Treat is a tour de force of fluency and
nasally lyrical lines, as they skim the surface
of the rhythm section’s propulsive wash. Maybe
there’s some Eastern, perhaps Arabic influence
in the title track – though Miles Davis’s
influence on Estiévenart is palpable
here and the funk bass and Jazz Rock guitar
tell their own stories.
There’s a Soft Machine workout
on A Cannery Catastrophe and the rather
smart aleckly titled Cunnimingus Redux
– more Mingus than Cunni and not much
Redux – thins to single, spare, sparse lines
rather attractively. It makes a change from
some of the relentlessness elsewhere.
Dean plays with tremendous
versatility throughout, whether one appreciates
his tonal qualities or not. The arrangements
are spirited, and there’s great density and
depth to the sound. There are crisp front
line passages, some intriguing guitar fills,
funky bass lines and powerful percussive statements.
As a Dean envoi it could scarcely be bettered.
Jonathan Woolf
CD Reviews
MONJUNE RECORDS MJR009 [68:17]
