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Excerpt from an Article in Jazz & Pop Magazine January 1968
THE SCENE
By Frank Kofsky
LET YOUR LIGHT SHINE DOWN ON ME
So, speaking (or writing) as we were of the intertwining of jazz and rock, let us consider the rock group Clear Light. I had heard the band highly touted by Pauline Rivelli during her brief visit to the coast after the Monterey Jazz Festival: but I never had much of a chance to check them out myself, apart from one very abbreviated visit which Pauline and I paid to Clear Light’s slightly down-at-the-heels mansion on the eastern edge of Hollywood. A few days after the band’s Elektra LP was released, however, I finally had an opportunity to drop in on the Clear Light and arrange for a photo and interview session.
I returned later that same evening to catch the group in the middle of a long (one hour) modal jam that could only suggest the John Coltrane approach to improvising. On my first visit that day organist Ralph Schuckett and I had rapped extensively about the new jazz, especially Coltrane’s contribution there to. Ralph, it soon developed, was an avid Coltrane, follower and was eager to know all the details of the interview with Coltrane I was privileged to Conduct (J & P, September 1967).
Just how taken Ralph was with Coltrane became, so to speak, clear to me during Ralph’s numerous solos. It wasn’t only that he was partial to the same phrases that Coltrane employed in his modal period, he even managed to arrange the stops and levers on his instrument in such a way as to suggest the actual sound of the Coltrane soprano saxophone. Needless to say (which is why I guess I have to say it anyway), I was moved by what I heard.
Another aspect of Clear Light’s jamming that put me in mind of Coltrane in particular and the new jazz groups in general was the energy with which the band played. Although there are two drummers in the group, Dallas Taylor and Michael Ney, it is Dallas who is the obvious heavyweight and who drives the band with wild and oblivious abandon. Though he plays basically a rock percussion pattern, the forcefulness of his drumming make you (meaning me) think of Elvin Jones. And as you will see from the interview that follows, my intuition was not too wide of the mark. Dallas was actually at one time a jazz drummer – are there any rock drummers these days who weren’t? – and he considers Elvin Jones to be “the only jazz drummer that I can associate myself with.”
Dallas and Ralph (or Ralphie, as the band calls him) are not the only Clear Lighters with a dose of jazz in their musical pedigrees. Guitarist Bob Seal has also been influenced by a number of jazz guitar players, but I don’t want to spoil the show by giving away the contents of the interview here, so I’ll leave it for you to read about Bob’s background below.
Though the Clear Light is now heavily involved with extended improvisation, this wasn’t true of the band at the time their album (Clear Light) was recorded. Indeed some of the tracks on it are 9 or even 12 months old as I write (Halloween eve). The group is determined that their next album will be a more accurate representation of where they’re at now; they go so far as to speak of having only six tracks on the entire album, which is virtually unheard off for a rock band. But then, it is unmistakably evident that such is the direction the music is travelling.
One other thing – the complete personnel of the band: Ralph Schuckett, organ: Bob Seal, guitar and vocals: Cliff De Young, vocals: Doug Lubahn, bass: Dallas Taylor and Michael Ney, drums.
Kofsky: How does the current rock scene in general and the Clear Light in particular relate to jazz?
Ralph: Well all of us have played jazz before and it is a basic influence on us. I played jazz for a while- from the age of about 15 until just recently, I still do occasionally. I | ||