Interviews

MIKE OLDFIELD

Mark Jenkins on the new album from not one but two of popular instrumental music’s greatest names.

Ever an innovator, Mike Oldfield, whose multi-instrumental album “Tubular Bells” dating from 1973 completely revolutionised the whole idea of non-vocal rock music, is now about to launch an album in collaboration with another living legend of instrumental music, Karl Jenkins of “Adiemus” fame. While Oldfield’s primarily a guitarist, Karl Jenkins played keyboards and oboe with the ’70′s jazz-rock band Soft Machine of the Canterbury music scene which also included Caravan and Gong, but for many years now has returned to his classical roots and has become the most popular living classical composer in the UK. Karl Jenkins’ albums including the “Adiemus” series (used very widely for TV advertising) are uniquely accessible compare to most contemporary classical music, and when Oldfield was looking for a classical collaborator for his new album “Music of the Spheres”, their shared label Universal was able to put the duo together.

“That’s the great thing about being on this label now, Universal Classics and Jazz – they have contacts with all these great performers and their management companies, and that was exactly what I needed for this album”, Oldfield explained from his new base near Palma on the island of Majorca, “and the next performances I do will probably be completely acoustic, just with the orchestra playing, a pianist, and myself on acoustic guitar”.

Let’s look back though at the history of this unique performer, for those who aren’t familiar with his distinctive work. As a teenager in the early 1970′s Oldfield played acoustic guitar and bass and performed in a folk music duo with his sister Sally. Joining Kevin Ayers’ band The Whole World, as well as playing in the pit orchestra for musical such as “Hair”, he met classically trained keyboardist David Bedford and was introduced to Richard Branson, who was running the Virgin Records mail order operation before the well known record label of the same name was launched.

Oldfield played Branson the first part of his instrumental composition “Opus One”, and over a year later (after failing to find interest from various record labels, most of which insisted on the addition of some vocals), Branson made Virgin’s Manor recording studio available to Oldfield, who along with engineer Tom Newman multitracked the album, playing various guitars, piano, Lowrey and Hammond organs, Mellotron and various folk music instruments. Finally a “Master of Ceremonies” (Vivian Stanshall from the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band) was added to introduce some of the instruments playing the final thematic passage, the last of which was a set of Tubular Bells – which became the new title of the album.

Launched on the new Virgin label, “Tubular Bells” became a worldwide hit (after being covered for the soundtrack of “The Exorcist”) not least because of its entrancing opening theme, layering piano and organs in a repetitive 7-7-7-8 pattern. This was influenced by the very early minimalist music of Terry Riley and Philip Glass, but this style was only one of a huge range of influences merged together on the album and subsequent ones including rock, folk, jazz, blues and African music. On the original mix of the subsequent albums “Hergest Ridge” and on “Ommadawn” Mike introduced more vocals, though mostly sung in wordless dialects, and eventually more conventional pop songs like the worldwide hit “Moonlight Shadow”.

The success of these albums and singles allowed Mike to invest heavily in the latest technology, and he was rarely dependent on commercial studios, multitracking himself at home using footswitches to start and stop the recorders. His keyboardists such as Tim Cross played Roland, Prophet, ARP Solina and Oberheim synths, and Mike adopted MIDI keyboards and computers very early on, at one point travelling with an Atari Stacey portable MIDI computer and an E-Mu Proteus multitimbral module in a briefcase. His movie soundtrack “The Killing Fields” made much use of the Fairlight CMI sampling keyboard, incoporating many ethnic sounds in line with the Cambodian setting of the film, but Oldfield didn’t enjoy the movie soundtracking process, preferring to invest in very expensive video equipment to create his own visual music projects such as “The Wind Chimes”.

At various times – mostly when there’s been a need to change record labels – Oldfield has re-visited the original “Tubular Bells” theme, releasing TB2, TB3, The Millennium Bell, and most recently in 2003 a complete new anniversary performance of the piece, not to mention a very early orchestral version of the music arranged by David Bedford, with which Mike had almost no involvement despite its apparent similarity to the new album. “Yes, they wanted me to tour with “Tubular Bells” in the seventies, but I didn’t really want to do it, so the idea was to have an orchestral version which could be performed by any orchestra anywhere. But that never really worked out, though it has been performed in a few places – David Bedford had done the arrangement and I was hardly involved at all”.

Mike’s last double CD album “Light And Shade” was in fact his most keyboard-oriented to date, with software such as Logic and Fruity Loops taking the fore and even the guitar sounds taking something of a back seat. On “Music of the Spheres” though there’s a good deal of grand piano, now played by the prominent Chinese classical pianist Lang Lang, but the software has taken a rest in favour of a huge orchestra arranged and conducted by Karl Jenkins.

The concept’s a familiar one used in the past by the late jazz composer Neil Ardley on the similarly titled “Harmony of the Spheres”; that the moving planets and the universe as whole generate a sound which is inaudible to humanity but neverthless pivotal to the harmony of all living things. “I started off with a completely different idea. I wanted to compose something about Hallowe’en – I love that time of the year and of course “Tubular Bells” has always been associated with this sort of spooky atmosphere. But like any piece of work your ideas may change as you go along, and when it had come together I started thinking more about this idea of the harmony of the spheres. Obviously you sometimes add titles at the last minute and you have to hope that it all still hangs together, but I think in this case it certainly does”.

Apart from the Tubular Bells-like repetitive themes, now played by the violin sections rather than the usual rock band technology, the other notable element of the album is a distinct Eastern feeling – maybe because of the importance of the Arabic astronomers in the history of cosmological thought? “Well, that element is certainly there. I do like using these Eastern scales and they generate a particular atmosphere, so there’s a lot of that in the compositions. And I had written a lot of parts for voices too; I wanted to get Hayley Westenra to do a vocal part and we got her down to the studio at Abbey Road during the recording sessions. I’d written this part very high, and I thought she might have some trouble with it, but she had no problem at all and I think it came out really well”. The piano parts of Lang Lang by contrast were recored remotely – “he was in a studio in New York and I just logged in using Apple iChat so he could see me on a little laptop image and I could see him, so we were able to work that way pretty well”.

MIDI MADNESS

The “Music of the Spheres” album went through a few changes as it developed. “Well, it started off as another electronic album with electric guitars and synthesizers, so there is a MIDI version of it. But when I wanted to have it arranged orchestrally we found the playing just wasn’t precise enough for Sibelius to score it out. You have to have absolutely precise timing, and you also have to have absolutely fixed velocities, which for a MIDI composition sounds awful. So I had to do a lot of re-editing before that was ready to hand over to Karl Jenkins’ scoring assistant, but once I knew how to do that it all went much faster”       

While the opening “Harbinger” opens with a stacatto string pattern straight out of “Tubular Bells”, the pivotal high register tinkling grand piano and Spanish guitar join in very rapidly. Theme established, “Animus” shows much more variation from minimalist atmospheres to huge arpeggiating piano passages under romantic, movie soundtrack strings. “On My Heart” though becomes a showcase for the soprano voice of New Zealand-born singer Hayley Westenra, and is reminiscent of something from one of those Michael Nyman/Peter Greenaway movie soundtrack collaborations. “Prophecy” has space for some brass punctuation, though Jenkins as on some of his Adiemus albums sticks mainly to the string orchestra, and percussion interludes such as on “Empyrean”, though reminiscent of Oldfield’s use of ethnic drums on “Ommadawn” and elsewhere, are pretty brief too. “Musica Universalis” winds up many of the themes throughout the album, which ends with a terrific orchestral climax.

MUSIC TECHNOLOGY

Though Mike had kept up with changes in music technology for many years, recently a couple of house moves have forced the pace more than ever before. The conservatory style studio next to his house near Chalfont St. Giles was at the time of recording “Tubular Bells 2003″ equipped with a huge Neve mixing desk, a Fairlight Merlin hard disk multitrack machine, Akai samplers and Roland modules, a huge number of guitars, and a Mac computer running Logic and all its associated soft synths.

Two years ago this setup was mostly sold off and the remainder moved into a new nine-bedroom house near Bristol. The latest multi-core G5 Mac computers were installed so the main mixer could be abandoned in favour of a (similar looking) controller surface from Euphonix, which was used to set up the basic mixes of about 86 tracks, but after that remained mostly passive. Finally using the Boot Camp software the Macs were made to run Windows as well as Mac operatin systems, so Mike could compose with Logic but score with Sibelius, which wasn’t working quickly under the Mac operating system.

A more recent move out to Spain – with twin bases outside Palma and in Monaco – has seen these systems stripped down even further, with little except the latest generation of Intel Mac computers in use. “I sold off a lot of gear, even some of my original guitars, because you just don’t need all that equipment any more. Once the Intel Macs came in, everything started to work really well. I had changed to Steinberg Nuendo as a main sequencer because Logic just wasn’t keeping up, and that wasn’t too difficult to learn and has a lot to offer in the area of mixdown, though I think Logic is working well again now. But until recently something like Sibelius was running really slowly on Macs, so you had to run a Windows system as well. But I don’t mind having to go that way, having both operating systems on my computer, because now I can run the business stuff on Vista and my music on the Mac operating system”.

FUTURE PERFECT

With most of the studio equipment having disappeared and the latest compositions involving only orchestral performers, the future seems to be shaping up very differently for Mike. “I did play some live shows in Germany a couple of years ago, we did 19 dates with a full rock band lineup with an orchestra and choir behind us, there were various other artists on the tour too. So I did an arrangement of parts of “Tubular Bells” and bits of “Ommadawn” and the hit singles like “Moonlight Shadow”. But to go out and do that now, you would need to play almost every night – you’re paying accomodation for all those people every night you aren’t performing, so you have to have quite a heavy schedule. With this new album, it’s all scored out, any orchestra can play it, so I just go to a new city and the local orchestra performs it. For the first live shows I don’t want any amplification or any lighting, so there won’t really be any technology involved at all, and I’m really looking forward to being able to do that”.

The de-emphasis of complex technology will also fit in with Mike’s current lifestyle, his move out to Monaco and Spain, and the birth (imminent at the time of writing) of his latest child. “I think of myself as being semi-retired now. I’ll see how well this album is received and whether the record label asks me for something similar, but performing it won’t be so complex. I’d had enough of living in Britain, the weather was getting me down, and at my age I really felt I’d like to live in the warm and to be able to work and walk around in my shorts”.

www.mikeoldfield.com

The Return of KEITH EMERSON 

MARK JENKINS on the new CD and band lineup from a rock keyboard legend

Keith Emerson needs no introduction for most readers of this magazine – but here’s one anyway. Keith’s rise to fame of course was helped out no end by the collective inability in the early 1970′s of himself, Greg Lake and Carl Palmer to come up with any better name for their new supergroup than “Emerson, Lake and Palmer”. Around that period there were a number of supergroups such as Cream on the scene, but ELP had a particularly interesting background. Emerson had spent several years with the groundbreaking group The Nice, which had innovated in the use of classical orchestras and arrangements in rock music; Greg Lake had been singer on the massively successful King Crimson debut album; and drummer Carl Palmer had been the powerhouse behind chart band Atomic Rooster.

As a keyboardist trained in both classical and jazz music, Emerson had quickly exceeded the abilities of his co-members in The Nice (originally formed as backing group for singer PP Arnold), but Lake and Palmer were much better equipped to keep up. Emerson was innovating on a technological level too – as well as playing Hammond organ, grand piano, clavinet and other instruments, he had got hold of one of the first Moog Modular synthesizers, and despite needing a technician on stage to keep it in tune and help make parameter changes, had managed to get some incredible performances out of the instrument. Right from the debut of ELP, anything seemed possible.

The band in fact made their debut at the Isle of Wight festival (guitarist Jimi Hendrix also performed there, and at one point was discussed as a possible member of the band, which would have taken it in a very different direction indeed) and quickly established the mixture of classical and rock music which Emerson particularly want to promote, liberally seasoned with the ballad material of Greg Lake. A highlight of the show was an arrangement of Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” which remained a concert staple for over 30 years, and ended with the (rather over-enthusiastic) firing of two naval cannon from the stage. ELP had arrived, and Keith Emerson’s progress towards becoming the world’s most prominent rock keyboardist had begun.

Emerson Innovates

In the decade or so that ELP lasted, Keith Emerson brought in many innovations in the use of keyboards in popular music. He’d already started using the Moog modular synth with The Nice, but the gliding synth solo added to Greg Lake’s ballad “Lucky Man” on the first ELP album really brought the Moog sound to prominence. “Pictures At An Exhibition” recorded live and rushed out to capitalise on the success of the debut ELP album showed what the Moog Modular could achieve in a live setting (though not always perfectly in tune, it has to be said) but subsequent albums like “Brain Salad Surgery” (titled after a song omitted from its final cut which only re-appeared some years later) really stretched the instrument, using its sequencer to create repeated patterns and riffs which Emerson could transpose all over the keyboard. With Lake playing bass, Emerson was obliged to deliver most of the solo melody lines, which he ably did using MiniMoogs and other instruments as well as performing long, semi-improvised piano solos fusing classical, jazz, rock and popular music. But when Lake switched to electric guitar, Emerson’s left hand took on some extremely active bass parts and on tracks like “Tarkus” featuring extremely complex time signatures, his left hand technique really exceeds that of most keyboardists using both hands together.

Emerson though was always searching for new sounds, working closely with Bob Moog to create a polyphonic ensemble instrument which appeared on some ELP tracks long before Moog actually launched a commercial polyphonic synth. And like Stevie Wonder, Abba, Led Zeppelin and others, he was fascinated when Yamaha introduced a huge, triple keyboard polyphonic synth to their Electone organ range. The GX1 became available in time for ELP’s triple album “Works” and the subsequent tour, accompanied by a full orchestra, of football stadium venues in the USA.

The tour and album gave birth to a single “Fanfare for the Common Man” (arranged from Aaron Copland’s classical piece) which is still widely heard particularly on sports programmes to this day, but disaster was to come. In 1976/1977 punk music came to prominence, and ELP’s style of symphonic rock was suddenly utterly out of fashion (Genesis and other bands having similar problems at the time). The football stadium tour using a full symphony orchestra to perform long pieces such as “Fanfare” and “Pirates” had to be curtailed, the band completing it as a three-piece at huge financial loss. A follow-up album “Works 2″ appeared to be comprised of nothing but out-takes (the previously unheard track “Brain Salad Surgery” finally appearing from the vaults for example) and amidst some bad feeling about the upshot of the “Works” tour, a final album recorded in the Bahamas was pushed in a very commercial direction, featuring a dreadful bare-chested sleeve shot of the band and the unfortunate title “Love Beach”. It was the end for ELP, at least for a while.

ELP’s Return

In the last days of ELP, Emerson had relied very heavily upon the Yamaha GX1, which excelled at creating very heavy synthesized brass sounds, thin cutting lead lines and strange wobbly effects, having unusual facilities such as pressure controlled vibrato speed. But the giant GX1 was too heavy to move around, and Emerson fancied some time away from the music hubs of London and Los Angeles, so settled in the Bahamas with a new generation of polyphonic instruments from Korg. The PS3300 and family were versatile, but had no very distinctive sound of their own, so Emerson’s albums from this period – mainly film soundtracks such as the Sylvester Stallone cop movie “Nighthawks” plus the eccentric collection “Honky”, from which there’s an interesting video online at www.keithemerson.com/Downloads/salt-cay.rm – are undistinguished. Emerson also scored some Japanese and Italian movies, and most of these eventually appeared on comprehensive CD collections.

The lure of the trio lineup persisted though, and Emerson tried out two – Emerson Lake and Powell with the late drummer Cozy Powell, and the even more short-lived Three with Carl Palmer and Robert Berry. Perhaps a full ELP reunion was inevitable though, and this finally took place in the mid-1990′s when the band released the albums “Black Moon” and “In The Hot Seat”, toured extensively and released live CD’s and DVD’s from shows at the Royal Albert Hall in London, from the Montreux Jazz Festival, from Gdansk in Poland and so on.

Perhaps it was the lack of major label support which limited the effectiveness of ELP’s comeback – prog rock still remaining far from in vogue to this day – but since 2000 Emerson had tried a few new variations including re-forming and touring with The Nice (though still playing many ELP tunes using the outstanding talents of guitarist/singer Dave Kilminster) and appearing with scratch symphonic, rock and jazz bands at events such as the MoogFest in New York. In 1995 he released an album “Changing States” including unreleased pieces, early versions of tracks from “Black Moon” and various collaborations, and this featured guitarist Marc Bonilla on several pieces. And that collaboration takes us full circle, since Bonilla is central to the new incarnation of the Keith Emerson Band, with a debut album released on the Edel label this month.

“Keith Emerson Band featuring Marc Bonilla” crams in 19 tracks, some of them quite short, and spanning an enormous range of styles from electronic music to rock, classical and jazz. “It’s my first studio band album since ELP”, Keith explains, other releases having been taken from live performances or compiled from various sessions and lineups. Keith, it seems, really wanted to go to town on this one, so “it’s complete with a DVD of the “making of”, and is a culmination of my life’s work in music so far”.

In the ELP days it often seemed that the songwriting was a problem, with members often not able or willing to offer new compositions when they were needed, while arguments over whether independent producers should be used or who should gain production credits often held up recording. No such holdups these days though – “this album’s consisting of brand new compositions written by Marc Bonilla and myself”, Keith explains, “and wonderfully produced by both Marc Bonilla and Keith Wechsler. I like to think it furthers the progression of “Prog” by way of the same proven formats I used before”.

So what exactly is that magic format? In the past, grand concept pieces like “Karn Evil 9″ and “Pirates” alternated with shorter songs and ballads, and Keith agrees that the album definitely shows a return to those days. “Namely a grand conceptual piece, followed by lighter shorter pieces” – so not just one style within an album, but “a ubiquity of eclectic ideas, that no doubt will develop in live performance”.

The album’s opening track “Ignition” for instance is reminiscent of very early ELP pieces using church organ, mixed with some powerful sequenced Moog sounds. In recent years Emerson has been going on stage with the Moog Modular, with a Hammond organ very extensively modified by Goff Professional, with a GEM or similar weighted digital piano, and with a few synth modules stacked offstage. Is that lineup going to be sufficient to reproduce all the styles on the new CD? In fact the new band lineup is already on tour in Eastern Europe “using the same original keyboards that I used on this album, with the addition of real playing”. So sequencer parts heard on the CD can generally be played by hand in live arrangements, and with the talented lineup of Emerson on keyboards, Travis Davis on bass, Tony Pia on drums and Marc Bonilla on guitar & vocals, that should present no problem at all…

On other tracks the new CD has lots to offer too – some boogie-woogie piano on “Gametime”, huge amounts of rock Hammond organ on “Miles Away”, “Fugue” and elsewhere, church organ, plenty of grand piano and even a bit of harmonica. ELP-like musical jokes such as bits of sailors’ hornpipe and classical references are also present, Marc Bonilla’s guitar sounds are extremely varied and include a lot of e-Bow sustain techniques, and the rhythm section of Pia and Davis is extremely powerful.

All in all, this comeback for one of the world’s top rock keyboards players is a very satisfying one. Let’s hope that the impetus can be sustained, and that we’ll see a lot more of Keith Emerson and the band in the near future.

www.keithemerson.com

www.myspace.com/edelrecords

www.edel.com

THE KEITH EMERSON BAND is:

Keith Emerson – Keyboards

Marc Bonilla – Guitar and Vocals

Travis Davis – Bass

Tony Pia – Drums

MARC BONILLA – Guitar and Vocals

Currently based in L.A. Marc has played guitar and toured with Warner Bros. recording artists Toy Matinee as well as recording two critically acclaimed guitar instrumental albums for Reprise “EE Ticket” and “American Matador”.

He has also has produced, recorded and performed with several artists including Ronnie Montrose, Glenn Hughes of Deep Purple and Keith Emerson.

For over a decade he has composed and performed for numerous television shows and major motion pictures including The Scorpion King, The Replacements, Falling Down, Terminal Velocity, Waterworld, Mad Money, Spy Kids, Spiderman 2, Bruce Almighty, Las Vegas, Kid Notorius, The PJ’s, and ER, collaborating with such notables as James Newton Howard, John Debney, Joel McNeely and Snuffy Walden receiving an Emmy award nomination in 2001 for his score for David Milch’s Big Apple.

In addition to recently completing the album with Keith Emerson, he has also finished composing the score for another feature film entitled “Two:Thirteen” as well as a new album, Full Circle, with California Transit Authority featuring original drummer and co-founder of Chicago, Danny Seraphine.

TRAVIS DAVIS – Bass

Travis Davis has been performing publicly since the age of 10 in all musical styles from Rock and Jazz to Classical. Moving from Indiana to Los Angeles in 2006, he immediately began integrating himself into the L.A. scene. He has been heard on such network TV shows as Las Vegas, Monarch Cove, and VH-1, and has performed with such notables as Eric Martin (Mr. Big), J.R. Richards (Dishwalla), Danny Seraphine (Chicago), Troy Luccketta (Tesla), Alice Cooper, and now Keith Emerson.

TONY PIA – Drums

Tony Pia’s drumming career is rich in musical diversity and the kind of explosive technique that has landed him gigs with some of the world’s most prominent musicians. His performances with the now famous One O’clock Band at North Texas State University catapulted his career into the world of live entertainment with a surprisingly eclectic group of celebrity artists: Larry Carlton, The Brian Sezter Orchestra, Bobby Caldwell, Edgar Winter, Maynard Ferguson, Woody Herman, Van Morrison, The Turtles, and Spinal Tap, David Lee Roth, Dianne Shuur, Kenny Rankin, The Shirelles, Herb Ellis, and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra.

Currently Tony lives in Los Angeles where he performs, records, and teaches. Some of the more popular TV projects he has recorded for include Friends, Good Morning America, and The Today Show as well as commercials for Toyota, Carl’s Junior, Radio Shack and Harley Davidson.

TECHNICIANS

Keith Emerson’s elaborate synthesizer and keyboard rig is immediately recognizable to long-term fans, representing musical history in its combination of the latest high-tech gadgetry and early versions of the first synthesizers ever produced by Bob Moog. Emerson’s pioneering work with the Moog synthesizers made both Emerson and these synthesizers famous. Keith Wechsler is the Keith Emerson Band production manager and live sound mixer, and Marc-André Berthiaume is the technician who keeps the keyboards and other instruments in working order.

KEITH EMERSON – DISCOGRAPHY

EMERSON LAKE & PALMER

Emerson, Lake and Palmer

Tarkus

Pictures at an Exhibition

Trilogy

Brain Salad Surgery

Welcome Back My Friends, to the Show that Never Ends;

 - Ladies and Gentlemen, Emerson, Lake & Palmer

Works Vol. 1

Works Vol. 2

Love Beach

In Concert

The Best of Emerson, Lake and Palmer (Compilation)

Black Moon

Live at the Royal Albert Hall

Return of the Manticore (Compilation)

In the Hot Seat

Works Live

Then And Now (Compilation)

WITH OTHERS

Emerson, Lake and Powell

3: …to the Power of Three

THE NICE

The Thoughts of Emerlist Davjack

Ars Longa, Vita Brevis

Nice

Five Bridges

Elegy

Keith Emerson with The Nice

The Nice – Box Set

Greatest Hits

Nice Collection

America – The BBC Sessions

Viva Citas (Live in Glasgow 2002)

SOLO ALBUMS

Honky

Cream Of Emerson Soup (also known as ‘Changing States’)

The Christmas Album

Inferno

Nighthawks

Murderock

Best Revenge

La Chiesa (The Church)

Harmagedon

Iron Man (TV)

Emerson Plays Emerson

Hammer It Out – The Anthology

At The Movies

Off The Shelf

Keith Emerson Band featuring Marc Bonilla (2008)