Core values
Carr is just one of seven stars on a sensational proto hip-hop UK jazz-rock jamboree. By Ben Thompson.
Ian Carr’s Nucleus ★★★★★ Roots BEWITHRECORDS. CD/DL/LP
“IT’S BASICALLY already hip-hop.” Thus one veteran UK turntablist explains the enduring allure this previously hard-tolocate 1973 Vertigo landmark’s amazing title-track has for the blunted beats fraternity. Edited down from its original 40 minutes to a pithy nine and a half, Roots is at the same time one very long breakbeat, and as close as fully homegrown British jazz ever got (pretty damn adjacent in this case) to the entrancing fluidity of Miles Davis in his John McLaughlin phase. The best I can do for a capsule description is Fela Kuti trying to cover Billy Cobham’s Spectrum with David Axelrod in the control room.
Maybe you’re a Nucleus neophyte, keen to put the closing number on Direct
Hits back in its original context. (If Alan Partridge was right about The Beatles’ best album being The Beatles’ Greatest Hits, how much more true might that be of Ian Carr’s shape-shifting jazz-rock fusion ensemble?) Or perhaps you were sent this way by Madlib’s deft Roots repurposing. Last but not least, I would also say that for those previously haunted by fear of fusion,
Roots would be a hell of a gateway drug. This is the sixth and perhaps best of the nine albums that different versions of Ian Carr’s Nucleus released from 1970-75. While Miles Davis was the obvious contemporary parallel in terms of shifting personnel on a musical mission where one man’s word being law seems to have brought out the best in everyone, posterity allows us to mix in The Fall as a rogue comparative element (Belladonna, the fourth in the sequence, was credited to Carr alone, because the only ones that could stand the pace by that point were him and his granny on bongos).
Pieced together at the time from various sources, reflecting the precariousness of such virtuosic endeavour (can you guess which track began life as the third movement in a four-part suite to celebrate Shakespeare’s birthday?), Roots can be heard almost half a century on as a brilliantly sequenced, entirely satisfying musical adventure. The stunning theoretical handbrake turn from the ticking hi-hat Herbie Hancock heist movie soundtrack of the opening number into the Arcadian vocal space-jazz of Images, featuring singer Joy Yates, is negotiated with effortless poise. The whole world is indeed Nucleus’s oysterbed. And as for the concluding segue from the cowbell-driven jazz/metal
musique concrète of Odokamona into the redemptive Mingus tribute of Southern Roots And Celebration, well, you’ve got to hear it to believe it.