“Phil has a very intense thing going.”- Mike Ratledge, 1971

SOFT MACHINE - DROP
Rare archive recording features Soft Machine in explosive action
by SID SMITH

In 1971 the ever-evolving Soft Machine entered yet another period of transition following the departure of one of their founding members, drummer Robert Wyatt five months after the release of their Fourth album in February 1971. His replacement was Phil Howard, who had come to the UK along with a wave of other top-drawer players from Australia and New Zealand in the 1960s and was part of Elton Dean’s group, Just Us.

Whilst this decision may have been born out of necessity, Howard's arrival was a boost to Dean’s desire to move to a looser mode of expression, something he'd been doing since Fletcher’s Blemish (from Soft Machine’s Fourth) and their live blow-out, Neo Caliban Grides, which had been opening live shows of the day to startling effect.

Howard's arrival altered the band’s sound with a challenging approach that tipped the group into a deeper improvisational direction that fully embraced a more strident and uncompromising presentation during their live shows. When observers describe drummers as 'whipping up a storm' this is certainly true in Howard’s case. His playing often sounds more like a force of nature than anything remotely to do with keeping time or adding rhythmic emphasis, reminiscent at times of Stu Martin or Tony Williams’ polyrhythmic salvos, constantly pushing the group out to the very edge of their material.

Though Drop contains several regular titles from the Soft Machine set list, you’re unlikely to have heard them played quite like this.
As fast and loose as Robert Wyatt could be with tight arrangements such as Slightly All The Time and Out-Bloody-Rageous, Howard doesn’t so much play around with them as burst through them in a squall of ride cymbal, clearly regarding the drums as much a frontline instrument as the sax and keyboards. As Dean and Ratledge roar full blast on their respective instruments, bassist Hugh Hopper, so integral to the early make-up of the band, provides an anchor to the heads and riffs that help the audience navigate their way as Howard embarks on the stormy seas of his rhythmic excursions.

With Dean and Howard preferring the free-jazz direction they were now unambiguously leaning toward in their interpretations of the repertoire, they found themselves on the opposite side of Hopper and Ratledge had been steering toward more through-composed structures from Third onwards. While Hopper and Ratledge would sometimes refer to Howard and Dean as ‘the dynamic duo’ the group now essentially sat in two opposing camps whose tension would ultimately pull the group apart. It was a situation that came to a head as the band entered Advision Studios to begin recording Fifth in November 1971 and in January 1972 Phil Howard formally left the band to be replaced by John Marshall. Four months later in May, Elton Dean also left the group, replaced by Karl Jenkins who would ultimately take Soft Machine in an entirely different direction.

Although Howard was only with the group for five months his playing had a huge impact on the band and audiences alike, creating a chaotic thrashing jazz with Howard at its tempestuous centre. First released in 2009 and long out of physical print, Drop's radio broadcast-sourced audio has now been beautifully restored and remastered by Mark Wingfield, making this rare recording of a full concert by this lineup one of the most exciting Soft Machine archive recordings to date. This is Soft Machine at its most acerbic, most radical, and most compelling.

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Howard’s Dark Swing: Something Passed Us By
by STEVE LAKE

Within a couple of weeks in the autumn of ’71 the Soft Machine, making history as a casual matter of course, became the first ‘pop group’ (as the straight press still called them) to play both the Donaueschinger MusikTage and the Berlin Jazz Festival, hallowed bastions of, respectively, experimental composition and the evolving jazz tradition. At the former, they followed Krzysztof Penderecki and Don Cherry…and at the latter they followed ex-group member Robert Wyatt, who’d gotten there first to put a beat behind a “violin summit” and Sugar Cane Harris’s assurance that his mojo was still workin’. Poetic justice, or plain bringing it all back home?

Around the Soft Machine, style categories had a way of melting and morphing like Mark Boyle’s bubbling oil projections back at the UFO club. This most idiosyncratic of groups lived, paradoxically, in a permanent state of transition. Usually manned by players with markedly different ideas of where they wanted the music to go, the Soft Machine was fueled by high-octane creative tension yet remarkably open to the divergent needs of a broad-minded time. Need a somewhat-classically-influenced rock ensemble for the Proms at the Albert Hall? A quartet of improvisers to work opposite Thelonious Monk at Ronnie Scott’s? A trio of wide-eyed innocents to zig-zag all over North America opening for Jimi Hendrix? A band for a Picasso play on the fringes of St Tropez or an Alfred Jarry multi-media celebration for the Edinburgh Fringe? A band to inaugurate a Sufi study centre in Kingston, play a free gig in Hyde Park, jam with poets at the Roundhouse, or freelance as Syd Barrett’s back-up band for a couple of tunes? The Soft Machine had done and been all these things and much more in a tightly-compressed early career which, looking back on it, seems like a dream.

What odds for survival would you give, today, to a young group citing the influence of Olivier Messiaen’s additive rhythms and sound-colour, Thelonious Monk’s lurching, cross-hatched tunes, Cecil Taylor’s swarming sound-clusters, Ornette Coleman’s acidic lyricism and Terry Riley’s hall-of-mirrors loops and pulse patterns? Drawing deeply upon such inspirations, the Soft Machine honed a brand-new music, updated it each season, fired up an international audience with their constantly-modified innovations, and were lionized as role models of artistic integrity and independence by a generation of European bands. By the time the 60s became the 70s the Soft Machine had acquired more than a cult following. Their double album “Third” was a UK chart hit. In France the group were prize-winning cultural heroes, with awards from the French government as well as the academic Dadaists of the College of Pataphysics . In the week between the Donaueschingen and Berlin gigs, Der Spiegel ran an article on the band’s genre-transgressing popularity, pointing out that 50,000 copies of “Third” and “Fourth” had been sold in the previous 12 months in Germany alone. The greater the distance the band puts between itself and pop, Der Spiegel implied, the more the audience loves them!
Mike Ratledge drily cautioned that there were no guarantees that the trend would continue or that better music would be played now than on any given night in the past...

In or out of vogue, they’d pitched their tents at the borders of the genres, and the borders were uncertain and dynamic. If the musicians still looked much like any other hippie rock group, their presence, in early 1971, was increasingly incongruous on TV shows with names like “Beat Club” and “Pop Shop”. By the year’s end, only the merciless volume of the live performances linked them to rock. The ever-changing group now began to resemble some louder cousin to Miles’s “Fillmore” band or the Cecil Taylor Unit - while continuing to play music that could have been shaped only by the Soft Machine. This Machine was the most challenging of them all.

Accelerating the drive towards the edge and over it was new drummer Phil Howard, who streaked through SM history like a meteor. While Robert Wyatt had been with the band at least five years (longer if you factor in Canterbury apprenticeship with Machine prototypes), his replacement lasted barely five months. Between September 1971 and January 1972 the Soft Machine quartet with Phil Howard, Elton Dean, Hugh Hopper and Mike Ratledge played about thirty concerts across Europe, appeared on a couple of radio shows, and recorded half an album. Then the whistle was blown and Phil Howard sent off, soon to disappear from view altogether. It’s the half-album for which he is, largely, remembered today: Side One of the LP “Fifth”. Impressive as those few cuts are (and, too, the few radio tracks that have lately appeared on compilations) they do not begin to convey the savage impact of this edition of the group in concert. The present release, the first-ever full-length account of the late ’71 Soft Machine on CD, is an overdue corrective, an incendiary performance that prompts some reevaluations.

Howard had arrived in Britain from Australia in 1969 and was soon working with musicians around saxophonist Clive Stevens, including other jazz-aligned Antipodeans, like New Zealanders Dave MacRae and Neville Whitehead. When Wyatt took a leave of absence from the Soft Machine in 1970 to tour with Kevin Ayers, Howard auditioned as possible substitute. My own first experience of him in concert came early the following year when an Elton Dean Quartet (not yet called Just Us) with Phil Howard on drums, played on a transfixing London Roundhouse bill that included Ayers’s Whole World, Daevid Allen’s Banana Moon gang, Symbiosis with Wyatt and Keith Tippett and half the Brotherhood of Breath, as well as the ‘classic’ Soft Machine quartet. Soft Machine alumni were walking on and off stage all night long. Anyway, there was Phil Howard playing jazz in various shades of free. Details blur at this late date, but Elton’s was the most ‘acoustic’ group that night, and Howard was the only drummer using two bass drums. He was thinking loud, and playing in layers and waves of sound with rumbling thunder at the bottom end. It was unusual to see a ‘free’ drummer behind a rock-sized kit. (In some London circles it had been considered cool to go the other way, ever since John Stevens had trumped Sunny Murray’s minimalist kit by using a child’s drum set.) What would ‘free’ have meant to Howard, then? I’ve seen him described as ‘a Tony Williams-style player’, but while he clearly shared Williams’ love of polyrhythms and his conviction that drums can be part of the frontline, a lead instrument, Phil Howard was a much less tidy player. His goal was not the execution of “Some Hip Drum Shit” (old Williams title), it was something more existentially passionate. Rashied Ali, with Coltrane, had put the notion of ‘multi-directional drumming’ into the air with recordings like “Interstellar Space”. In their duos Dean and Howard were reaching for a comparable freedom – it could be a messy, dangerous business. Ornette, meanwhile, talked about ‘spread rhythm’, a living net of percussive energy that would support a soloist without binding him to a restrictive time signature and the tyranny of the “one”. This notion also would not have been lost on Phil Howard. Mostly, he played this way because this is the way he played – the position of the artist, rather than the good all-rounder.

Elton Dean’s affinity with Howard’s drumming is always singled out in accounts of the period. They were, without doubt, great together. But Mike Ratledge also sensed, in Elton and Phil’s free playing, a way out of an impasse that Soft Machine had backed themselves into. The group had been racing around the European circuit for a year with, essentially, the same repertoire of – by mainstream jazz or rock standards – complex material. Life on the road left little time for writing new compositions. They could experiment with different permutations of their pieces in the hell-for-leather, helter-skelter, breakneck medleys they played, but they were still the same pieces. The players endeavoured to wring what improvisational freedom they could from them.

The thread through Soft Machine history is the changing relationship of musical freedom and form, the ways in which structure and improvisation influence each other, and by 1971 Ratledge had concluded that “the free areas have tended to be more productive than the written areas…There are certain types of material that are so tight that it is very difficult to be loose about them.” A taste of a loose, freer Soft Machine, and a preview of intensities to come had been gained in March ’71 when Ratledge joined Elton Dean’s group in what was effectively an overture for a “Soft Machine & Heavy Friends” BBC broadcast. This tantalizing proposition was followed up on Elton Dean’s leader debut disc for CBS, recorded in May at Advision, when Ratledge was again present for two crucial cuts, his electric piano and organ buffeted by the gathering winds of Phil Howard’s drum attack.

Ratledge was the composer of the most difficult tunes in the Soft Machine book, the ones that swerved and dodged in odd meters, and it was clear to him, even before the quartet with Howard had played its first gig, that his quirkier time-signatures were unlikely to be articulated too precisely from the drum chair: “Phil has a very intense thing going, and he seems to think in terms of multiple bar lengths, three or four bars at a time and works with that,” Ratledge noted in the summer of ’71. “It’s hard to tell at this stage what change it’s going to make, because we’ll all have to adapt…”

It was a bold and perhaps surprising move to take aboard a drummer wilder than the famously temperamental Wyatt, but the Soft Machine’s most fastidious composer was intrigued by the bracing impact of Howard’s drums and cymbals. We shouldn’t forget that Mike Ratledge’s musical priorities had been shaped by listening to Cecil Taylor as well as Paul Hindemith (who, by the way, summed up as his early interests as “all kinds of chamber music, and jazz band”). Big gestures, raw tone, and a dash of musical violence – these aspects were part of Ratledge’s palette, too.

The music on this CD was recorded on the way toward the “Fifth” album and eclipses it on several levels. Phil Howard was in his element in live performance as a real-time improviser absorbing and transforming energy and tossing it back into the ensemble like showers of fireballs. His playing is full of pent-up power; it vibrates with sheer emotion, stirs the singed molecules of the air with its dark and blistering swing.

Just listen to “Neo-Caliban Grides”. There are several very strong performances of this Elton Dean piece in the Soft Machine’s discography - but not like this. From the opening salvo, everybody rises to the challenge slapped down by the drummer. In fighting for his space, to use the old terminology of free jazz, he demands that everyone else does the same, and this recording contains some of the most committed playing by Hugh Hopper and Mike Ratledge on disc. Howard is literally forcing them into new spaces. I can see why they ultimately found it daunting – for the drummer, musically insistent to a confrontational degree, was rigorous about never playing anything the same way twice. In the Soft Machine, the reinvention of the music on a nightly basis was never more radical than in this period. Elton Dean, no longer the ensemble’s junior member, flies high in this context, but so do Hopper and Ratledge on this recording. Ratledge’s long organ solo on “Drop”, for instance, bursting forth against a hard, elliptic Hopper-Howard groove, is wildly beautiful. It’s preceded by Dean’s extended sax feature on “Slightly All The Time”, which unfolds inside a flaming cathedral of crackling drums: the older pieces, as well as the pieces about to be premiered on disc with Howard (“All White”, “Drop”, “MC”), are re-viewed from strange perspectives. “Out-Bloody-Rageous” puts the emphasis on the “Bloody” – its trajectory is like an assault course, and from moment to moment it’s not clear who is better equipped to survive it, the players who wish to honour the structure or those who are fighting to leave it. If this section makes for uneasy listening, it’s also as compelling now as it was almost forty years ago. These are musicians taking big risks - in an endeavour far removed from the condescension of “jazz-rock fusion”.

The “Third”-era Soft Machine made progressive jazz musicians sit up and take notice. The Dean/Ratledge/Hopper/Howard quartet had the enthusiastic endorsement of free improvisers. Trombonist Paul Rutherford, one of improvisation’s bona fide inventors, had played with Don Cherry in Donaueschingen and stayed in the wings to watch the Softs. He was sufficiently excited to join them for several concerts on the British leg of their tour, travelling with them through the North of England.

Music that burns with this kind of energy barely offers the option of fence-sitting, and for some audiences, this was a polarizing group. You surrendered to the enormous power of the late ’71 quartet or you didn’t. But there was some regional differentiation, and German jazz crowds particularly, perhaps conditioned to a diet of blood-and-thunder by the machine-gunning free jazz of the post-68 period, embraced the group: there was always room for a few more bright trouble-makers.

Back in London, three weeks after the Berlin Jazz Festival, the Soft Machine struggled to get the genie of freedom back into the bottle at the sessions for “Fifth”. Making LPs and playing concerts – these were two different disciplines, especially for a band like the Soft Machine. The present recording makes it clear that a live album would have been the way to go.

When they cut “Fifth”, Hugh Hopper and Mike Ratledge were, respectively, 26 and 28 years old. Had they gone as far as they could go into the free? I listen to this live recording from 1971 and hear exciting and moving music still alive with potential. In their Soft Machine life, Hopper and Ratledge had covered great musical distances in an incredibly short time: they’d gone places where no rock musicians before them had gone, cleared paths for others to follow. Brave, pioneering work – especially for introverted characters who would as soon have stayed home in the first place! Self-critically inclined, they were quick to question their capacity to keep pace with Phil Howard’s creative fury, and began to yearn for the shelter of compositional structure and arrangements again. Howard was not permitted to finish the work on “Fifth”.

Elton Dean followed him out of the band a few months later. Saxophonist and drummer fanned the flames awhile in Just Us, whenever they could find a gig. There weren’t many. Booked to play a week at Ronnie Scott’s opposite Weather Report in 1972, they only lasted one night. The usual mantra: too loud, too experimental, too volatile, too free. Phil Howard must have reflected on his changing fortunes. One minute headlining at JazzFest Berlin, the next minute bounced from the jazz clubs of Soho.

Sightings of Howard thereafter were rare. By the mid-70s, he’d effected a disappearance as complete as that of Henry Grimes. Eventually, of course, Henry came back. So perhaps there is hope. In the meantime, here is an album to savour. A document of a mighty band with a whirlwind drummer, a very special highlight among the Soft Machine’s invigorating live recordings.