Jon Lord 1941 - 2012

It barely seems like five minutes ago that I was writing a post about the role of the extraordinary Hammond Organ in my musical apprenticeship (in fact it was over two years ago) and now here we are mourning the passing of one of its greatest exponents, Jon Lord.  Along with the likes of Stevie Winwood, Keith Emerson and Rick Wakeman, Jon Lord was a master of the instrument and his signature jazz/rock licks can be heard underpinning music from Deep Purple, Whitesnake and his various collaborative bands from the sixties to the point when he became ill with cancer a year or so ago.

Weirdly, I never owned a Deep Purple studio album, opting for the ‘Live in Japan’ set and the rare ‘Marks I and II’ compilation but always kept a batch of taped DP singles recorded from the radio and TV.  More particularly, and in my usual manner of going for the fringe projects, I bought Deep Purple’s 1969 ‘Concerto For Group and Orchestra’ written by Lord, which I enjoyed then and still like today.  It speaks volumes of the man that he could encompass all forms of music from the discipline of classical composition to the unstructured improvisation of jazz and the sheer brutality of heavy rock.  In his mind, it was all just music and for that I applaud him.  It was a concept that he understood completely yet my music teachers at school failed to grasp.  As a consequence, I was instructed to believe that anything that wasn’t classical wasn’t really music.  What piffle – yet this was the late sixties when such views were rife.  This attitude has changed, thankfully, and today I can attend my daughter’s school concert and hear pieces by Mendelssohn, Bach, Lennon & McCartney and Journey (!)

In 1969 the idea of a ‘Rock Concerto’ was uncharted territory and tantamount to suicide artistically as the audiences for classical and rock music were utterly divided by both generation and attitude.  Rather than try to gloss over this chasm, Lord cleverly treated the rock band as the Concerto ‘soloist’ in place of the usual single instrument and rather than try to blend rock and orchestral instruments together, actually accentuated their differences by making the band loud and raucous thus creating a musical war that is full of drama and conflict.  The live recording with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra under Malcolm Arnold is stirring stuff, full of great orchestral themes juxtaposed with bluesy fuzzed up guitar solos.

I admired Jon Lord both as a composer and a musician and if you don’t like his Concerto (or subsequent Gemini Suite) just go and listen to his solos on ’Highway Star’ or ‘Burn’.  After all, it’s just music.

RIP Jon.

Deep Purple Rides Again

Although I didn’t actually meet any strange kinda women, it has been a bit of a Deep Purple week. Firstly, I note with barely disguised knowingness that the riff from ‘Smoke on the Water’ was awarded ‘Best Guitar Riff Ever’ by some survey of worthies, ahead of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, ‘Walk This Way’, ‘Purple Haze’ and ‘Sweet Child o’ Mine’. Well, duh!

The standard joke here is that it is claimed that all budding guitarists play this riff when trying out Flying Vs and Fender Stratocaster replicas in music shops to the annoyance of all concerned. But it’s true. When I last visited London’s Chappells music emporium, then located in Bond Street, many years ago to replace my aged acoustic guitar, I tell you no lie, someone was actually playing Smoke on the Water, very badly. You couldn’t help but laugh! I never went in for this sort of thing, but just played a few chords furtively to check the action and made my decision. I mean, who wants to show the world how badly you play?

The second Deep Purple moment came when I raided my sisters CD collection with a view to listening to something new and amongst all the 70s disco, came across a copy of ‘Stormbringer’. This was an album that I bought (on vinyl) when it came out in 1974 but because it followed the rock-outs of ‘Machine Head’ and ‘Burn’, I didn’t really think much of it, thus it was actually the last Deep Purple album I ever bought and indeed, I subsequently sold about ten years later. At this point in their long and tortuous life, Purple were in Mk III configuration having replaced singer Ian Gillan with David Coverdale and bassist Roger Glover with Glen Hughes. The changes made a fundamental difference to their sound that predecessor, ‘Burn’ didn’t really reveal. ‘Stormbringer’ did.

However, listening to it again has mellowed my view. Originally I didn’t like it precisely because it wasn’t in the same mould as previous Purple hard rock albums, but now I quite like some of it for the very same reason. In retrospect, the parts I like are the funky, bluesy tracks but not the rather clichéd rock tracks. Interestingly, I listen to ‘Burn’ less and less despite loving it in 1973. This is when you realise that you have a sort of creeping movement in your appreciation of musical style and that your choices very rarely stay still over time.

The test comes when re-evaluating stuff that you used to love years ago only to find that it is scarcely listenable. It’s the bands that you can still bear to listen to that show how good they really were.

Now, dare I listen to those Mk IV Purple albums with Tommy Bolin?