{"id":7861,"date":"2015-05-20T05:30:03","date_gmt":"2015-05-20T09:30:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=7861"},"modified":"2022-07-21T16:03:57","modified_gmt":"2022-07-21T20:03:57","slug":"review-two-new-albums-from-larry-coryell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2015\/05\/20\/review-two-new-albums-from-larry-coryell\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: Two New Albums featuring Larry Coryell"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of music’s greatest guitarists, Larry Coryell<\/strong><\/a> has enjoyed \u2013 and continues to enjoy \u2013 a long and storied career. After his professional start playing with Chico Hamilton<\/strong>, Coryell launched a solo career, enlisting the musical help of some of the most innovative, boundary-pushing musicians to aid in his own musical explorations. He’s played in most every style, and one of the qualities that differentiates him from many of his contemporaries is that he does so with an unparallelled level of authenticity; there’s no whiff of dilettantism in Coryell’s excursions into hard rock, soul jazz, classical, acoustic, or other forms and styles.<\/p>\n

Being such a restlessly varied musician carries with it a price, as others in the rock idiom know too well; I’m thinking here of artists such as Neil Young<\/strong>. When you can’t be counted on to make an unbroken string of recordings in roughly the same style, you’re hard to market. Thankfully, Coryell has sustained a career that lets him remain safely above such concerns. The result is a buffet of musical wonders. And though the man rarely looks back (as he told me<\/a>, he has little or no interest in his back- catalog, and he has no control over it either), there’s nothing \u2013 other than the scarcity of some of those discs \u2013 that prevents listeners from exploring his older material.<\/p>\n

And modern-day listeners have the best of both worlds. Two new releases make this plain: Coryell has just released another new album on Wide Hive Records, Heavy Feel<\/em>, and something called the LiveLove Series has a new archival release of a January 1975 concert recording featuring Coryell’s underrated and under-appreciated fusion ensemble, The Eleventh House<\/strong>. What follows is a look at both of these new releases.<\/p>\n

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Larry Coryell & The Eleventh House \u2013 <\/strong>January 1975<\/strong><\/em>
\nAt the time of this recording, Coryell’s Eleventh House were near the peak of their powers and popularity. Thanks to the foresight of Radio Bremen, prime-era Eleventh House were captured onstage in Germany. This flawless recording documents twelve numbers from the show, including three compositions that have never been released before in any form. After grabbing the audience’s rapt attention with a fiery \u201cBird Fingers,\u201d The Eleventh House settle into a groove that showcases the many talents of Coryell and his bandmates: Mike Lawrence<\/strong> on trumpet and flugelhorn, bassist John Lee<\/strong>, keyboard whiz Mike Mandel<\/strong> (by this time, a longtime Coryell associate), and powerhouse drummer Alphonse Mouzon<\/strong>.<\/p>\n