EDDIE JOBSON
Portrait of the artist as a young man.
If it’s true that you can judge a person by the company they keep, then Eddie Jobson is somebody to reckon with. Replacing violinist Daryl Way and keyboardist Francis Monkman in Curved Air, Brian Eno in Roxy Music and both George Duke and Jean Luc Ponty in Frank Zappa’s band not only takes a lot of talent but also quite a bit of nerve and selfbelief. What makes it all the more remarkable is that these significant milestones were achieved when he was just 17, 18, and 20 years old respectively. Even if his talents were not so abundantly obvious, the sheer calibre of those he appears alongside on this two-disc set makes for an interesting and stylistically diverse journey.
TECHICALLY SOUGHTAFTER, JOBSON DELIVERED IT ALL.
In addition to that starry roster, Jobson digs into his personal archive to exhume three interesting rarities including an excerpt from his debut live performance aged 16, and a later Abbey Road demo session where a Satie-like melody receives sympathetic backing from drummer Simon Phillips.
Tracks such as As The World Turns, originally the B-side to 1997’s non-album track, This Is Tomorrow by Bryan Ferry, highlight his skills as an arranger. A Ferry/Jobson co-write, it finds Robert Fripp striking a plangent note as featured soloist amid the melancholic tresses of Jobson’s strings. Both opulent and redolent of the fading glory of a grand affair, the instrumental melodrama has Ferry alone at the centre, gazing pensively into the distance, forlorn and oblivious to the bittersweet cadenzas which swirl and gather about him. Over the top? Yes, but incredibly evocative and effective.
That technical facility kept Jobson busy and sought-after throughout the 1970s. If some switched-on Bach was needed, a jazzy arabesque required or a rhapsodic flurry on keyboard or violin deemed necessary, then Jobson delivered it all. Little wonder he was called in to contribute in-studio fixes for
King Crimson’s 1975 live album USA, though this is not represented here. Up until this point, Jobson’s primary role had been as executant rather than executive. With U.K. he grasps more creative control, and the meld between Wetton’s straight-ahead bombast with Jobson’s Zappa-flavoured exposition is clearly important to him, with no less than 11 U.K. studio tracks spotlighted.
For a man who admits to ‘control issues’, the compromises of being in a band made a solo-orientated career inevitable, finding continued success scoring for TV and film throughout the 80s. More volumes plan to cover his development both as a solo artist and producer up to 2019, but this selection illustrates the blossoming of his precocious talent in all its pomp.