Wrażenia na gorąco...
Po pierwsze: personel. Na saksofonie głównie Gilad Atzmon. Dużo mojego ulubionego puzonu (Annie Whitehead). Yaron Stavi na kontrabasie. Większość materiału była nagrywana w studiu Manzanery (z Roxy Music), co w praktyce oznaczało, że swoje trzy grosze wtrąci Brian Eno... I stało się! Wpływ Eno jest duży, choć teoretycznie nie gra na żadnym konkretnym instrumencie (jak to się już mu nieraz zdarzało, np. w Roxy). Czasem śpiewa (kto słyszał kiedyś jego powalająca płytę z roślina na okładce, wie o co chodzi...). I jest jeszcze dwóch gitarzystów. Całkowite przeciwieństwo. David Gilmour i Paul Weller. Każdy  ma dla siebie tylko (aż) jeden utwór. Pierwszy - 'Forest' - nabrał w efekcie cech wczesno-floydowych, psychodeliczno-klimatycznych. Ciekawe. Natomiast numer z Wellerem jest absolutnie genialny, to mój kandydat na utwór roku! Powalający! Dzieje się w nim mnóstwo, naprawdę miażdżące brzmienie, gitara Wellera raz eksploduje, raz tnie rytmicznie, raz zawodzi (w Jamowym stylu...)! A na końcu szept: "Sweet dreams, old chap, sweet dreams". Gitara jest jeszcze raz - w postaci pięknej introdukcji do utworu 'Tom Hay's Fox', w wykonaniu Tomo Hayakawy.

Cóż jeszcze? Misterne brzmienie, sporo klawiszowych pasaży (może ciut za dużo). Kilka podniosłych, ale jazzujących i momentami zaskakujących pieśni. Kołysanki. Jedna urocza piosenka ('Raining In My Heart'), jednak bez tekstu (jest tylko w książeczce, możemy sobie za to sami zaśpiewać!), w aranżacji na samo pianino. Dużo Wyatta na trąbce. Jeden mroczny numer o złowrogim tytule 'Beware', z niesamowitym pomysłem w środku ('wkręcenie dźwięku', nagle cięcie i słyszymy sam głos Wyatta: "It's just a warning"...). A na koniec przepiękna impresja (znów instrumentalna, choć utwór ma tekst - ponownie umieszczony tylko w książeczce, z zaznaczeniem, że oryginalne wykonanie jest w języku arabskim): 'La Ahada Yalam (No One Knows)', głownie na flet i klarnet. Jest jeden sampler, ale... z innego utworu na płycie! Całość podzielona na dwie równe części: Part One 'neither here' i Part Two '.....nor there'. Jest też piękny cover 'Insensatez' Jobima, równie dobry co słynne wykonanie Stana Getza (!). Raz pojawia się akordeon. Wśród bohaterów tekstów mamy Milesa, Juliette Greco (opisany jest ich romans w Paryżu), irackie dziecko przychodzace na świat podczas pierwszego bombardowania Bagdadu, Mordechai Vanunu, Mohammad Mossadegh. Wśród miejsc - uliczki Paryża, Hiroszima, Nagasaki...

Wielka płyta. Wyatt nareszcie stworzył swój własny muzyczny świat - Cuckooland.

Michał Wach, www.3ucho.art.pl

Robert Wyatt's first full-length of new material since 1997's Shleep is no less mischievous, witty, and poignant. As has become his custom, Wyatt offers a set of 16 new songs seemingly composed for a wide array of musicians including Annie Whitehead, Eno, David Gilmour, Tomo Hayakawa, Karen Mantler, Phil Manzanera, Paul Weller, and others he enlisted to record it. The album is divided into two halves. The first eight selections being 'neither here...' while the last eight are 'nor there...'. What divides the halves are in Wyatt's mind and aesthetics alone, as the disc feels like a seamless, unified whole. From the opener, "Just A Bit," a dastardly yet delightful bit of cynicism directed at organized religion and new age phoniness, the listener hears Wyatt in good humor with razor-sharp political sensibilities, and in fantastic musical form. The songs on Cuckooland are, in many ways, the most accessible he's written since Nothing Can Stop Us. Shleep had its moments in terms of this kind of "accessibility," but more often than not saturated itself in Wyatt's consummate and wonderfully listenable weirdness. Here, on cuts like "Old European," one of five collaborations with poet Alfreda Benge, Wyatt's wife, French salon music, smoky jazz from the cool jazz era, bossa rhythms, and Anglo melodies entwine in a bewitching nocturnal pop song. Others, such as "Beware," one of a pair of writing collaborations with Karen Mantler ? who contributed two more fine songs written for Wyatt'set ? feature the strident harmonics of post-millennial jazz as it intersects in dialogue with pop forms from the ancient to the future. Mantler's and Wyatt's voices sound lovely together in this tale of paranoia and woe, and Wyatt's trumpet solo is gorgeous. Wyatt's reading of Ms. Benge's "Lullaloop" is a gorgeous, wooly bit of swinging New Orleans jazz, shot through with Weller's bluesy, distorted, electric guitar solo and big, wondrous trombones by Whitehead. Wyatt covers, in his own fashion, the Boudleaux Bryant's classic "Raining In My Heart," accompanied only by his piano, and does a stellar, deeply emotional take of the Jobim & DeMoraes' classic "Insensataez." Wyatt's "Trickle Down"" is a knotty bit of loping post bop jazz interspersed with sax samples from "Old Europe," and killer double bass runs from Yaron Stavi. "Lullaby For Hamza," and the instrumental "La Anda Yalam" (the latter written by Nizar Zreik), portrayt two sides of the Gulf Wars, one dovetailing the other, bringing about with unnerving, poetically moving, and damning conviction, the side of these wars not often revealed to Westerners. These are tomes full of melodic and harmonic creativity, offered as deathly serious as words of elegance and grace, and become elegies sending the listener off with more to think about than a pop album would normally dictate. Wyatt has decorated his own booklet with lively, minimal artworks, and has annotated his songs to document certain facts, locations and occurrences, making the entire package indispensable. Most importantly, Wyatt has demonstrated once again that it makes no difference what else is going on in the pop world, he still creates a fiercely independent and wide open notion of song and composition that is always abundantly "musical," topically relevant, as well as entertaining, provocative, and completely, utterly engaging from top to bottom.

Thom Jurek, http://www.allmusic.com/

Patchily focused and unfinishable work from a slow-laboring ghost among the living
At Last I Am Old
by Douglas Wolk
November 17th, 2003 2:00 PM, http://www.villagevoice.com/

 

Prog-rock's great socialist rolls on. (photo: Alfreda Benge)

hen he was in his twenties, Robert Wyatt already had the voice of an old man?a quavering high lisp, laden with melancholy, jagged and ground down like the edge of an heirloom coping saw. Now that he's pushing 60 and his larynx is racked by age for real, he's got a lot of practice using its graybeard mojo. The guy could sing Das Kapital and it'd sound like "La Vie en Rose," which is fortunate, since sometimes he basically does. He's lived in England all his life, but despite the flashes of playfulness on most of his records, he sings and writes like an exile: "I just feel like a ghost among the living, that's all." Wyatt's a promiscuous collaborator (he's sung with Jimi Hendrix, Brian Eno, Elvis Costello, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Ultramarine . . . ), but a very slow laborer on his own?not counting compilations, he's made half a dozen solo albums since he quit his prog-rock bands Soft Machine and Matching Mole 30 years ago, and both of his new discs emphasize the inch-by-inch process of his work.

Cuckooland feels unfinished and maybe unfinishable?its artwork is constructed from Wyatt's scribbled chord sheets and structural notes. (Like 1991's Dondestan, the title means "nowhere"; this time, it also means "country of invaders.") It's got some of Wyatt's most nuanced singing, and oodles of casual charm?the amateur trumpet playing is right on. It's also plagued by overcrowded or underfed arrangements, ooky sax and clarinet solos, and some of the most god-awful synthesizer presets ever. There's a lullaby (for a child born during the bombing of Baghdad) and a "Lullaloop," a solo piano version of Buddy Holly's "Raining in My Heart," one new song that samples another.

Wyatt tends to bond for life with certain musicians, and a lot of Cuckooland's best moments come from his newest foil, New Yorker Karen Mantler. The daughter of his longtime collaborators Carla Bley and Michael Mantler, she's made some wonderful, barely heard albums of her own (hunt down 1996's Farewell). Mantler sings three of her old songs with him, as well as A.C. Jobim's "Insensatez"; he plays a "Karenotron" that samples her vowels. Her songs have a ratio of whimsy to despair that's the inverse of Wyatt's, and her voice is a deadpan version of his, with the same sort of flawed purity.

The patchwork Solar Flares Burn for You is, oddly, more focused: radio sessions and an experimental film soundtrack from 30 years ago, plus three recent home recordings. It's mostly sketches toward later collaborations, potential or actual?not demos, as such (other than "The Verb," which is probably the first song to cite Noam Chomsky as a linguist), but not-yet-fixed forms. The drone-and-loop film soundtrack pulses like an artery, and evolved into a prog-jazz jam on 1975's Ruth Is Stranger Than Richard. Again, one new song samples another, which in turn is Wyatt tootling a cornet over a loop by Hugh Hopper, his occasional bandmate of 40 years' standing.

The highlight of Solar Flares is also one of the peaks of Wyatt's career: a heartstopping solo BBC session from 1974, part of his "comeback" after an accident that left him permanently wheelchair-bound. The difference between those performances and a set recorded with Francis Monkman two years earlier is the difference between a promising goofball and a fully arrived artist. In the 1972 tracks, Wyatt's a snarky show-off, at home in his own skin, singing Danny Kaye's "Little Child" in funny voices and snickering about arts council grants. By 1974's "Sea Song" and "Alifib," he's a foam-flecked ghost, lost and found again. He covers "I'm a Believer" as a skeptic's explanation, in all seriousness, of how love has actually saved him. He doesn't belong in the world where he finds himself, but he couldn't leave it if he tried.

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Spis utworów
1.    Just a Bit (Wyatt) - 5:09 2.    Old Europe (Benge/Wyatt) - 4:15 3.    Tom Hay's Fox (Wyatt) - 3:33 4.    Forest (Benge/Wyatt) - 7:55 5.    Beware (Mantler) - 5:09 6.    Cuckoo Madame (Benge/Wyatt) - 5:20 7.    Raining in My Heart (Bryant/Bryant) - 2:42 8.    Lullaby for Hamza/Silence (Benge/Wyatt) - 5:00 9.    Trickle Down (Wyatt) - 6:47 10.    Insensatez (DeMoraes/Jobim) - 4:24 11.    Mister E (Mantler) - 4:20 12.    Lullaloop (Benge) - 2:59 13.    Life Is Sheep (Mantler) - 4:14 14.    Foreign Accents (Wyatt) - 3:48 15.    Brian the Fox (Wyatt) - 5:31 16.    La Ahada Yalam (No-One Knows) (Zreik) - 4:16
Wykonawcy	Instrumenty
Robert Wyatt	Percussion, Piano, Trumpet, Cornet, Cymbals, Drums, Keyboards, Vocals, Producer, Engineer, Liner Notes
Phil Manzanera	Vocals
Karen Mantler	Harmonica, Piano, Keyboards, Vocals
Alfreda Benge	Vocals, Artwork
Brian Eno	Vocals
Paul Weller	Guitar
David Gilmour	Guitar
Annie Whitehead	Trombone
Gilad Atzmon	Clarinet, Flute, Sax (Alto), Sax (Soprano), Sax (Tenor)
Jamie Johnson	Guitar (Bass), Vocals, Producer, Engineer
Yaron Stavi	Double Bass