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Neil Ardley

Harmony of The Spheres

Very Rare Original UK LP released on Decca Records in 1979.

Matrix No's

Side One - ZAL-16086.P-1G

Side Two - ZAL-16087.P-1G

Harmony of the Spheres was composer Neil Ardley's final album for a major label.  Released by Decca in the U.K. in 1979. This is the record many of Ardley's most  ardent (no pun intended) fans and jazz purists have dismissed out of hand.  Simply put, both groups are wrong. The primary reason for this dislike is  two-fold: first, the ubiquitous use of synthesizers. Given that this is a  conceptual recording of the title, derived from the complex notions of the  ancient Greeks, Ardley could find no acoustic instruments that could actually  reproduce the sounds required. He assigned musical notes to each of the planets  and discovered that the ratio of the orbit times of Mercury and Pluto (assigned  the highest and lowest tones, respectively, because of their distance from the  sun) were virtually identical to the ratio of frequencies of the sounds of the  upper and lower range limits of human hearing. That this entire schemata is only  approached and achieved once on the entire album, on "Soft Stillness & the  Night," is immaterial. Ardley composed an entire suite around these sounds, the  "harmony" as it were, and came up with a stellar jazz-rock set, that combines  some of the very finest elements of prog, jazz improvisation, funk, and rock  composition to hit record stores, and sounds distinctly different from anything  else in his catalog. The cast on this brilliant album includes trumpeter Ian  Carr and members of his band Nucleus, vocalist Norma Winstone, Tony Coe and  Barbara Thompson on reeds and winds, Geoff Castle, Trevor Tomkins, Richard  Burgess, Pepi Lemer, and the utterly amazing (and largely unrecognized) Billy  Kristian, whose bassline is the anchor of the entire set, and who gets in some  amazingly funky playing. The other big surprise is the appearance of John Martyn  on electric guitar -- playing both lead and rhythm -- his playing here goes far  beyond anything to appear on his own records -- let's put it this way, he could  have hung with John Goodsall of Brand X without difficulty and possesses a  trunkload of soul. Check out his smokin' fretwork on the opener "Upstarts All,"  which complements Kristian's bass work astutely. The disjointed funk on "Leap in  the Dark" would have been right at home in many clubs at the time, though its  syncopation would have thrown many. Here again, Kristian shines. Carr's genius  is heard bountifully on "Head Strong, Headlong," that walks a line between jazz,  funk, and blues. Taken as a whole, Harmony of the Spheres is not nearly as  jarring now as it was when released, and is far less a "commercial" album than  it was once considered. It's a fitting testimony to Ardley's compositional and  sonic genius that he employs synthesizers as not only architectural building  blocks but as actual melodic instruments as well. Only a brilliant pianist and  harmonist could accomplish such a thing, and Ardley was both. Luckily for us,  the grand British reissue label Esoteric released this set on CD for the first  time in the West in 2008.

Track Listing

Side One

1 Upstarts All
2 Leap In The Dark
3 Glittering Circles
4 Fair Mirage

Side Two

1 Soft Stillness And The Night
2 Headstrong, Headlong
3 Towards Tranqility
 

 

Released on Decca Records in  1979

Catalogue Number TXS-R 133

Record is in Near Mint condition

Sleeve is in Ex ++ condition

 

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