REDISCOVERED
Uncovering the underrated and overlooked
VARIOUS ARTISTS This Is Flying Dutchman 1969-1975
ACE 8/10 e sounds of a label that changed jazz forever
ONLY a handful of producers ever create reate their own identiable brand, and even fewer record labels establish a quality control so unerring you can safely buy its product unheard. When Bob Thiele set up Flying Dutchman, these two enviable attributes came together in a single package.
As head of Impulse! during the 1960s, Thiele produced all of Coltrane’s great albums including A Love Supreme, , as well as seminal recordings by Mingus, Pharoah h Sanders and Ornette Coleman among others. However, tiring of the corporate machinations at ABC, which owned Impulse!, in 1969 he launched his own label with a mission to produce jazz-based records that would sell and be played on the radio without paying obeisance to the all-consuming godhead of rock’n’roll.
The label’s story is told here over 16 tracks that illustrate the breadth and integrity of Thiele’s vision. Some of the artists migrated with him, including Coleman, whose freaky, funky “Friends & Neighbors” was almost a hit when released in 1970 as a seven-inch single. Other Impulse! refugees included veteran sax player Oliver Nelson, whose “125th Street & Seventh” is a brass-heavy soul-jazz behemoth featuring pianist Lonnie Liston Smith, whose own Cosmic Echoes band is represented by a brace of mid-1970s spiritual jazz landmarks in “Expansions” and “Peaceful Ones”. The producer then turned bandleader with an ambitious double album as the Bob Thiele Emergency, from which we get the stunning “Lament For Coltrane” with Joe Farrell’s °ute performing evanescent miracles over a minimalist rhythm of double bass and Elvin Jones’ brushed drums. But Thiele was a top A&R man too, and his most striking discovery was Gil Scott-heron, whom he signed to make an album of poetry and then turned into a singer, represented here by the classics “Whitey On The Moon” and “The Revolution Willnot Be Televised”. Another inspired signing was Gato Barbieri, who had been around the free-jazz scene as a sideman but whom Thiele liberated and set on the road to stardom as a bandleader on the 1973 album Bolivia. The magical title track nds Barbieri’s melodic sax and °ute weaving mystical patterns over Stanley Clarke’s insistent bass ri¡.
Yet another that Thiele turned into a star was Leon Thomas, a jobbing singer who had sung with Pharoah Sanders and whose 1969 solo debut Spirits Known And Unknown was the rst of ve LPS for the label. “Echoes” from that album showcases his unique yodelling style, supported by some weightless, °ute-like tenor sax played by Sanders, billed for contractual reasons as ‘Little Rock’.
Thiele’s label lasted but half a dozen years, but as this foundational compilation eloquently proves, in that brief time Flying Dutchman changed the sound of jazz forever.
NIGEL WILLIAMSON