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Post by maddogfagin on Jan 9, 2012 13:33:08 GMT
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Post by maddogfagin on Feb 9, 2012 19:32:32 GMT
No wonder Time magazine put Ian Anderson on the cover of its issue covering The State of Pop. At the rate he and his band are going, it would be no surprise if he became the first recipient of the Nobel Prize for Epic Rock ’n’ Roll.
This time Ian Anderson and his band of lunatics, known collectively as Jethro Tull, have outdone themselves. After building a reputation as one of the finest live groups in the world, they’ve reached an equally high recording pinnacle with A Passion Play (Chrysalis).
What exactly it is that constitutes the subject matter of A Passion Play is best left up to the listener. While it’s apparently a real “Passion” play, you’d be hard-pressed to find authentic Pentecostals telling tales like “The Hare That Lost His Spectacles,” though Tull bassist Jeffrey Hammond-Hammond ably elucidates it with flair and cultivation.
A Passion Play is packaged in full theatrical greasepaint, with the current Anderson lady posing in her work clothes (she’s a ballerina) on the covers. Inside comes a tongue-in-cheek playbill complete with lyrics, none of which clears up the incomprehensibility surrounding the album.
Even if the lyrics don’t make linear sense, they fill the music with the right complementary images. And that’s no small task, considering that Anderson’s music on this album, more than on any other past Tull effort, is arranged to form a complete cycle unmatched in recent English music and never even attempted by an American band.
There are noticeable influences of early Frank Zappa, as well as instrumentation and reed charts the likes of which Tull has never before utilized. Despite the “serious” patina the work has, there’s also an overall feeling of positive fun and wit in the music.
With A Passion Play, Jethro Tull has finally put together the perfect full-scale rock concerto. The result is both a joy and an exhilaration.
David Witz, Gallery, October 1973
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Post by futureshock on Feb 10, 2012 0:46:01 GMT
Silver conducts music. Apparently brass does too! How about a remix of APP at 24/96?
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tullist
Master Craftsman
Posts: 478
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Post by tullist on Feb 10, 2012 5:16:14 GMT
No wonder Time magazine put Ian Anderson on the cover of its issue covering The State of Pop. At the rate he and his band are going, it would be no surprise if he became the first recipient of the Nobel Prize for Epic Rock ’n’ Roll. This time Ian Anderson and his band of lunatics, known collectively as Jethro Tull, have outdone themselves. After building a reputation as one of the finest live groups in the world, they’ve reached an equally high recording pinnacle with A Passion Play (Chrysalis). What exactly it is that constitutes the subject matter of A Passion Play is best left up to the listener. While it’s apparently a real “Passion” play, you’d be hard-pressed to find authentic Pentecostals telling tales like “The Hare That Lost His Spectacles,” though Tull bassist Jeffrey Hammond-Hammond ably elucidates it with flair and cultivation. A Passion Play is packaged in full theatrical greasepaint, with the current Anderson lady posing in her work clothes (she’s a ballerina) on the covers. Inside comes a tongue-in-cheek playbill complete with lyrics, none of which clears up the incomprehensibility surrounding the album. Even if the lyrics don’t make linear sense, they fill the music with the right complementary images. And that’s no small task, considering that Anderson’s music on this album, more than on any other past Tull effort, is arranged to form a complete cycle unmatched in recent English music and never even attempted by an American band. There are noticeable influences of early Frank Zappa, as well as instrumentation and reed charts the likes of which Tull has never before utilized. Despite the “serious” patina the work has, there’s also an overall feeling of positive fun and wit in the music. With A Passion Play, Jethro Tull has finally put together the perfect full-scale rock concerto. The result is both a joy and an exhilaration. David Witz, Gallery, October 1973Appreciate your hunting this down Graham, I recall no positive reaction at the time, or much since either. Not familiar with Gallery, probably European. I may not have seen any other reviews than Rolling Stone which I'm sure was not good. Almost makes me want to go listen to it right now, I wish I could hear it like Bernie and others, it worked a handful of times down the years but not often enough.
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Post by maddogfagin on Feb 10, 2012 8:46:42 GMT
Appreciate your hunting this down Graham, I recall no positive reaction at the time, or much since either. Not familiar with Gallery, probably European. I may not have seen any other reviews than Rolling Stone which I'm sure was not good. Almost makes me want to go listen to it right now, I wish I could hear it like Bernie and others, it worked a handful of times down the years but not often enough. A Passion Play Jethro Tull Stephen Holden, Rolling Stone, 30/8/73
A Passion Play is the artiest artifact yet to issue from the maddeningly eccentric mind of Ian Anderson. Conceived for live performance as much as for disk, its ultimate presentation incorporates a short film, written, directed and edited by Anderson, in addition to the madcap hysteria of the stage show. Having not seen the play, I can only comment on the disk, which is a pop potpourri of Paradise Lost and Winnie The Pooh, among many other literary resources, not to mention a vast array of musical ideas derivative of influences as far-flung as Purcell, flamenco and modern jazz.
Viewed as a recorded oratorio, or as a prolonged “single,” or as any in-between hybrid, A Passion Play strangles under the tonnage of its pretensions--a jumble of anarchic, childishly precocious gestures that are intellectually and emotionally faithless to any idea other than their own esoteric non-logic.
Like Thick As A Brick, the aesthetic of A Passion Play is desperate zaniness, but here it is carried to even further extremes. The scenario roughly parallels the Passion of Christ. This parallel is not made half as clear in the play’s gibberish, pun-laden verses and double-entendres (e.g., the playing back and forth between “be” and “bee,” and in phrases like “Man/son of man”) as in the album’s cutesy playbill-within-record-jacket, perused in relation to its presumptuous title. If one undertakes the thankless task of unraveling the text as it coincides with the playbill, the sequence of events takes the following vague outline. Ronnie Pilgrim, a supercilious atheist, describes his own funeral, then goes through purgatory, part of which is a movie rerun of his life. He is teased by the saints who say: “Or/are we here/for the glory/for the story/for the gory satisfaction of telling you how absolutely awful you really are,” and then both narrates and is imaginative participant in a shaggy-dog fable, recited to film, called “The Story of the Hare Who Lost His Spectacles,” which (accompanied by the album’s most ponderous “incidental” music) is meant to sum up the mundanely single vision of his whole life.
There ensues a descent into hell (“a business office,” according to the program), in which Anderson takes, among other roles, that of Satan, followed by a resurrection into the drawing room of a Magus Perde. I leave it for the devout Tull freak to argue the details, the myriad subtleties, contradictions and paradoxes of this banal putdown, since, to my mind, neither the text nor the music seems to justify further analysis. Except for the addition of the “Hare-Spectacles” narration, the structure of A Passion Play is as free-form as Thick As A Brick. In tone, it is the ultimate exaggeration of self-indulgent English whimsy, an intellectual tease inflated with portent but devoid of wonder--in its cumulative expression mean and trivial.
The only positive aspect of the album is the performance of the music itself. The Jethro Tull band (same alignment as in Brick) is truly virtuosic in the manner of a polished chamber ensemble. The high points are those interludes that feature Anderson’s extraordinary flute playing, some of it seemingly multi-tracked. Two short pastoral sections that precede and follow the abominable “pooh perplex” are especially lovely. The overall impact of this music, however, is very slight. Not a single leitmotif sticks in the mind. What blues figurations there are are constipated and redundant. As a whole, the score is far less substantial than Thick As A Brick, itself a suffocatingly fey concoction. Finally, one leaves A Passion Play with the feeling of having been subjected to 45 minutes of vapid twittering and futzing about, all play and no passion--expensive, tedious nonsense.This probably one of the Rolling Stone reviews you were thinking of Ray. I can't say I agree with it myself but then other fans like TOTRnR which, although there are many songs on that album that I think are good, is not my favourite of Tull albums. But having said that, maybe it's the concept that I can't get to grips with. I'll have to have a TOTRnR weekend.
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Post by steelmonkey on Feb 10, 2012 17:30:45 GMT
As much as the review above trashes APP, one thing is clear: the reviewer was listening and thinking...without agreeing with his small nor larger points, I do respect a review that at least convinces me we were listening to the same piece of music...a feeling i don't get in many later-album reviews where it is clear that the writer's pre-conceived notions about Tull music and Tull hipness pretty much dictated the review with little or no evdence of listening to the music.
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Post by futureshock on Feb 10, 2012 19:23:36 GMT
That review hits some good points. While the over-arc thematic links seem weak, the strength of the album in my mind is that the musical segments are done with so much more musical and conceptual engagement. The "passion" play to me is the intensity of the music and lyrical creation working so well.
The "songs" within APP are excellently done. If only all songs produced on their own could hit the high water mark of APP's level of complete musical, psychological and recording quality engagement!
But when the album is criticized for some of the weak internal links, you have to sit back, look at what you're given and think for yourself. Me, I follow the album's lead, and it seems to be focused on segment impact rather than running a strong recurring thematic thread on the surface. That's why I suggested that Baker Street Muse was better than APP in some regards, because it is. APP though, as the big monster of a production, has its merits in different ways. The recording quality is heads and tails above TAAB1 and The Aquius Dude.
If APP could be stronger, it's probably only through having it performed live with a theatre group, rather than concert band, so we could see some character storyline, props, backdrop, and scene control, mixed with thematic threads of some sort working visually and through character behaviour. You see those things in the little "Hare" video, but in APP all we've ever had is the studio recording and the live band wasn't trying to turn it into a live theatre production (vs a concert).
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Post by maddogfagin on Feb 11, 2012 9:02:23 GMT
Jethro Tull: A Passion Play (Remaster)
June 21st 2003 Reviewer: Steve PettengillHere it is folks! A new digital remaster of the work that is often cited as The Album That Slew Progressive Rock. A Passion Play has never sounded better and is presented here in all its bombastic downbeat glory, complete with a vintage Quicktime video of "The Story of the Hare Who Lost His Spectacles". With A Passion Play, Jethro Tull very bravely decided to devote the entire record to one 45 minute composition as they had previously done with Thick as a Brick. While mainstream rock critics may have been scratching their heads over Tull's motivation for recording a lyrically oblique but musically very dynamic album full of English humor that possibly only the band members themselves could fully appreciate, A Passion Play is almost exclusively a dour affair. And the critics were merciless in their reviews. The savaging was so ferocious that Jethro Tull announced a retirement from touring, an ill advised scheme that Ian Anderson briefly discusses in the new liner notes. A Passion Play concerns itself with death and earnestly dares us to imagine what could be waiting on "the other side". Personally, I've always enjoyed the open ended nature of the lyrics. They work best as a series of bizarre images rather than as a linear concept piece. Despite the very often serious subject matter and the darker music on display, APP isn't completely devoid of humor. The booklet contains a reprint of the original faux ballet program complete with character bios and the whole package really smacks of Monty Python-esque comedy. The play itself is interrupted by the infamous "The Story of the Hare Who Lost His Spectacles", an absurd intermission that succeeds in breaking up the lengthy album storyline while also rather rudely disrupting the mood and flow of the album. A Passion Play is chock full of excellent musicianship that surprisingly never overreaches the way that Tales From Topographic Oceans by Yes(in many ways, APP's spiritual twin and catalyst for the progressive rock backlash by critics) is occasionally guilty of. The lyrics aren't so impenetrable as on Thick as a Brick and the dullish thudding production is given the best upgrade that modern digital remastering can achieve. It's taken Jethro Tull nearly twenty years to finally get around to properly remastering and repackaging their back catalog as the original releases on CD were some of the worst sounding digital product I've ever heard. Happily, the wait has been worth it. Thirty years on, A Passion Play still manages to intrigue; delightfully "artsy and pretentious". www.seaoftranquility.org
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tullist
Master Craftsman
Posts: 478
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Post by tullist on Feb 18, 2012 18:10:46 GMT
Thought to send this merely as a personal message to Bernie but why not annoy everyone with it. The Passion Play and I are sort of like eclipses, don't happen that often, but when they do I have little doubt this is, if not the best thing they have ever done, (though I have less trouble with his voice of recent years than most, surely his voice has never sounded better than on this recording)right alongside TAAB. This time ignited by that guy who went to the trouble of matching the original recording up to the concert footage, but more a case of just being in that rare spot of really being able to hear it, of it working on my personal colors you are to dig.
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Post by steelmonkey on Feb 18, 2012 18:33:20 GMT
Good analogy....some msuic requires the moon to be high and the wind to be right to hit the target...and some, the right chemicals! APP and TAAB on acid are painful...the inorganicity of the joins and the lack of compassion for the listener both somehow magnified by LSD...in fact, all my experiences of mixing LSD with Tull have failed, whether album or live, i come away thinkig: 'he hates me, he isn't having fun'...of course, using the dead as a stadard for LSD plus music puts the bar pretty high, i mean, who can match the disneyland for trippers that the dead purveyed?
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Post by nonrabbit on Feb 18, 2012 18:44:09 GMT
agree about the vocals
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tullist
Master Craftsman
Posts: 478
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Post by tullist on Feb 18, 2012 20:39:43 GMT
Bernie, I am very surprised to read that. I would mark some few of the psychedelic experiences I have had with Tull to be amongst the greatest moments of my life, a month's worth of entertainment in one night. Thinking specifically of the Nov 72 Brick tour, and one night in a buddy's basement winter 73 with the Passion Play with some lunatic hippie friend acting most of it and parts of We"re Only In It For The MOney, definitely Bow Tie Daddy, with a top hat and cane, and it actually worked, mighty weird. I remember watching beautiful tropical birds flying around in the specs on the linoleum on their basement floor so, pretty good evening. I also remember the bright lights flashing right in my face, this is in this guys basement remember, when IA sang the lines we've got you taped your in the play, most remarkable. I mean I was in the damn wondrous thing. Or one of those syncronous things like walking in the Scottish Highlands tripping in 82 or 3, just walking along the road with the headphones on on a dead beautiful day, hearing things like Tull or Steeleye was soooo fitting up there, and just as I came upon a carved wooden sign saying Loch Laggan that very song from Steeleye came on my headphones. Hearing lines while tripping about taking out Sir James heart and sticking it on a spear and giving it to his dear, is that the sort of thing folks around here engage in? Maybe I should not have been hitch hiking around there. I remember a trucker, an obese kind of sweating guy pickin me up that day with the thickest Highland brogue, not even sure alot of it was English, and while tripping trying to figure out, really straining, wtf he was saying, developing a policy of having him repeat himself a maximum of 3 times, usually still no no avail. Here is the nasty tale I heard in song of Sir James the Rose and what befell him at Loch Laggan youtu.be/MfbGYzl_AAQ
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Post by steelmonkey on Feb 18, 2012 21:00:15 GMT
I'm sure my LSD/Tull experiences were colored by my knowledge that daddy/ian is against drugs and i knew i was being bad to be one of those people who 'get stoned or something' when they listen to Tull.....My LSD trip during the 'A' tour was less inflective and a good memory....but encompassing the whole evening before Tull and night after wandering Hamburg with a good friend...somehow when I watch ian under the influence I get into a negative loop of feelings and thoughts.
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tullist
Master Craftsman
Posts: 478
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Post by tullist on Feb 18, 2012 21:25:44 GMT
Interesting Bernie, its marijuana and Tull that might not go as well with me, of course it is almost perfect for the Grateful Dead in any capacity. My perception of IA has long been that he is already living there, just one of those rare levels of advanced awareness. Even looking at the posed pics of him, maybe particularly in recent years, to me it looks like an obviously aware cat. Having said that I imagine he has a disparaging impression of psychedelics, possibly lumping them in with the generic title of "drugs", for which I believe marijuana and psychedelics to be outside that realm if only because they are non addictive. I would love to have him give a serious read to Storming Heaven and then to give verbal comment on his impressions.
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Post by steelmonkey on Feb 18, 2012 21:50:08 GMT
There is a vague story that he may have been dosed at the Fillmore west in 1970...gotten very, very, very, very angry, soldiered thru the gig and refused to play SF for 14 years...but frequently enough playing oakland, berkeley, Concord....he's never mentioned it ever so we'll never know if it's gossip or based in truth...what is for sure is that Tull demanded specific , expensive, wines but never 'partied' so Bill Graham sent a helper in with a corkscrew to open a bottle and a Tull roadie flipped and told him 'don't touch, these go in an instrument case for Ian's wine cellar back home'....score one for the late, great Bill Graham...who didn't live in Vallejo---he just liked to....CRASH THERE !!
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Jul 4, 2012 18:43:07 GMT
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Post by steelmonkey on Jul 4, 2012 19:12:22 GMT
Steve Wilson...My Hero !
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Post by nonrabbit on Jul 4, 2012 20:58:27 GMT
Steven Wilson the patron saint of Remix
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Post by steelmonkey on Jul 4, 2012 22:56:24 GMT
I think Wilson has/had a role in convincing Ian that a younger audience, prog and non-prog, care about Tull....I have no proof of this theory, i just think it and like him from that. I want to like Steve Wilson's music and I listened to a little Porcupine Tree and other stuff he plays on that came free with the Prog mag....it IS 'good' the way all prog can be like a good Yes or Pink Floyd album but it didn't really grab me or make me want more more more....but I'm gonna listen to more of his work...solo and otherwise...that's how much i want to like him ! Anyone have a favorite album or song to point me at?
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Post by nonrabbit on Jul 5, 2012 8:17:21 GMT
I think Wilson has/had a role in convincing Ian that a younger audience, prog and non-prog, care about Tull....I have no proof of this theory, i just think it and like him from that. I want to like Steve Wilson's music and I listened to a little Porcupine Tree and other stuff he plays on that came free with the Prog mag....it IS 'good' the way all prog can be like a good Yes or Pink Floyd album but it didn't really grab me or make me want more more more....but I'm gonna listen to more of his work...solo and otherwise...that's how much i want to like him ! Anyone have a favorite album or song to point me at? Yes you have a point - interview with Mr S Wilson. www.innerviews.org/inner/wilson.html"...We’re living in a time when a lot of bands are looking around and seeing that the climate has changed so much over the last 20 years. Many feel the right thing to do is perhaps go back and revisit what made their reputation. Yes famously did a return to that last year. For 20-30 years, classic progressive music was incredibly unpopular and unfashionable. I was talking to Steve Hackett about this. He feels for the first time that people actually appreciate the work he did in the ‘70s. He feels it’s only in the last three or four years that he’s begun to feel people value that work as his greatest achievement. For 30 years, he was told it was $h1t, that he was a dinosaur, and that the music was worthless and no-one was ever going to want to listen to that hippie stuff again. I cannot underestimate how these guys were brainwashed. Robert Fripp and Ian Anderson feel the same. They were brainwashed by the media into thinking everything they did in the ‘70s was worthless junk. It’s almost like abused child syndrome. It took a great amount of reassurance for them to begin to believe that people love that stuff and that it’s the work that their reputation will ultimately rest on. I experienced that with Robert when we worked on the remix of King Crimson’s Lizard. He said “Why do you want to do this Steven? No-one likes the record. Everyone hates it, including me.” I said “I’m going to change people’s minds.”
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Post by nonrabbit on Jul 6, 2013 22:15:03 GMT
40th Anniversary of UK release
i39.images obliterated by tinypic/jkvvyw.jpg[/IMG] [/font]
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Post by JTull 007 on Jul 7, 2013 0:18:33 GMT
Happy 40th APP Anniversary Bernie
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Post by steelmonkey on Jul 7, 2013 1:18:08 GMT
Listening to it now...one way to make 43 of the minutes till Ian in SF go by.` And if the only thing I accomplish on this planet is to make people think of me in conjunction with that album....I'm a made man!
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Post by JTull 007 on Jul 7, 2013 2:26:57 GMT
Listening to it now...one way to make 43 of the minutes till Ian in SF go by.` And if the only thing I accomplish on this planet is to make people think of me in conjunction with that album....I'm a made man!
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Post by bunkerfan on Jul 7, 2013 6:37:34 GMT
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Post by nonrabbit on Jul 7, 2013 10:19:04 GMT
If APP could be stronger, it's probably only through having it performed live with a theatre group, rather than concert band, so we could see some character storyline, props, backdrop, and scene control, mixed with thematic threads of some sort working visually and through character behaviour. You see those things in the little "Hare" video, but in APP all we've ever had is the studio recording and the live band wasn't trying to turn it into a live theatre production (vs a concert). Just reading through this thread again and I think this is a really good idea if Ian wanted to take another( rejuvenated) path if you like with APP. As previously said, by the experts on APP of which I am most definitely not, the beauty and strength of APP is the music and lyrics and the perfect blend. This and the overall theme albeit in segments would make a great visual fantasy. The only problem is that it might be a limited audience. How could you make that different?
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Post by futureshock on Jul 26, 2013 8:46:03 GMT
It would send creativity along a fine fine path to add a soprano or alto sax, but if the band wants to take APP, #1 question is "who's playing it, Ian's touring band or Jethro Tull proper, and if the latter, who's in the band?" You can't toy with that album, you can't give it a collegiate run-through to just play the notes, it's more like Miles Davis' Bitches Brew / Pangaea / Live Evil, and that means everyone in the band has to be somewhere special at the time, and the audience has to end up on Mars with no way home. Pale Blue Dot territory.
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Post by futureshock on Jul 26, 2013 23:47:23 GMT
At the start of APP, there are three main sounds; 1) pulse/heartbeat, 2) sax, and 3) the swirling/cycling whatever, before the drums start.
What was used to create the swirling sounds?
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Post by maddogfagin on Jul 27, 2013 7:32:36 GMT
At the start of APP, there are three main sounds; 1) pulse/heartbeat, 2) sax, and 3) the swirling/cycling whatever, before the drums start. What was used to create the swirling sounds? I would think it was John Evan's keyboards. The sleeve credits on the version I'm playing, as I type this, states "John Evan: Piano, Organ, Synthesizer, Speech."
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Post by nonrabbit on Jul 27, 2013 8:03:58 GMT
It would send creativity along a fine fine path to add a soprano or alto sax, but if the band wants to take APP, #1 question is "who's playing it, Ian's touring band or Jethro Tull proper, and if the latter, who's in the band?" You can't toy with that album, you can't give it a collegiate run-through to just play the notes, it's more like Miles Davis' Bitches Brew / Pangaea / Live Evil, and that means everyone in the band has to be somewhere special at the time, and the audience has to end up on Mars with no way home. Pale Blue Dot territory. Here I am again, drawn back to this idea of a stage/theatrical version of APP. I agree that it would have to blow your socks off but if there was a remote chance of it happening it would have to appeal to a wider audience other than the die-hard Tullians on planet Tull. So on that note, I disagree with you in that I think it would have to be slightly tweaked and adapted however in some way keeping an element of it's late sixties/early seventies prog theatrical magic and overall simplicity. A mighty challenge. Maybe if it concentrated on some of the elements already mentioned in this thread ie medieval mystery play, a touch of Midsummer Night's Madness (John Lydon in that sequence would be a name catcher ) and some added music it might just work. When's the last time you saw a Shakespearean, prog, visually and musically stunning piece of theatre?
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