Neil Ardley: Kaleidoscope Of Rainbows

The last twelve months or so have been a giddying reissue bonanza for fans of British jazz from the '60s and '70s. A feast following a famine, of course, as most of the reissued music, much of it now on CD for first time, has been unavailable for over twenty years. That axis of key innovators and soloists from the era which was Neil Ardley/Michael Gibbs/Ian Carr/Don Rendell has been particularly well represented, with seminal albums resurfacing on Universal's Impressed strand and the independent reissue specialists BGO (Beat Goes On) and Ace Records.

So far, only the crème de la crème of Britjazz from the period has been made available again, with every resurfacing album more or less essential listening, and Kaleidoscope Of Rainbows is foursquare in that category. It sounds as fresh, as inventive and as exciting today as it must have done back in '76, first time 'round.

Rainbows was the third album in a trilogy recorded by composer/bandleader Neil Ardley which started with '69's Greek Variations, reissued last year on Impressed, and continuing with '71's A Symphony Of Amaranths, rumoured to be up for reissue later this spring. In each of these albums, within different contexts, Ardley was concerned with, as he put it, "integrating the warmth and individual feeling of improvised music with the formal beauty of composition to the benefit of both." The context for Greek Variations was a series of variations on a Greek folk song, while for Amaranths it was settings of poems by Yeats, Joyce, and others.

For Rainbows Ardley nodded back to Greek Variations, this time developing the suite from the basic five note pelog scale used in Balinese music. It was also the album in which he first explored proto-electronic music—there are three, count 'em, synthesisists here—which became a key interest of his in the late '70s/early '80s.

The suite's seven movements, ranging in mood from the gentle and pastoral to the fiery and urgent, are seriously enjoyable through-compositions in their own right, and also the settings for a series of glistening solos from Ian Carr, Brian Smith, Dave Macrae, Geoff Castle, Paul Buckmaster, Barbara Thompson, Tony Coe, Ken Shaw, and Bob Bertles—with Buckmaster's electric cello on "Rainbow Three," Thompson's soprano on "Four," and Coe's clarinet on "Five" approaching the sublime.

With pin-sharp 24-bit remastering, and a solid twelve-page booklet which includes Ardley's original liner notes and an appreciation of his life and work (he died young, just over a year ago) by Barbara Thompson, Kaleidoscope Of Rainbows lives up to every myth that developed around it during its wilderness years. A landmark album in British jazz.