The Chris Hinze Combination ~ Netherlands

Despite what it may look like below, I have a few Hinze albums in the collection. I just haven't written anything meaningful for any of them. We'll get there eventually.

Here is my summary from 7/18/09: Dutch flautist Chris Hinze was far more than just your usual jazz flute player. Especially on Mission Suite where he combines jazz and progressive rock very effectively. Stoned Flute and Live at Montreux are more steeped in the jazz tradition, but aren't standard by any means. Who Can See the Shadow of the Sun is a bit looser than the others during this period, and will appeal most to those into "out" jazz. Sister Slick is probably Hinze's heaviest album, with Philip Catherine on guitar, and is a good representation of the harder edged fusion style. His later 70s work strayed towards fuzak. Interesting to note that his other album from the early Seventies, 1972's Virgin Sacrifice, has been reissued on CD. I'm sure it earned a CD imprint (on his own label) since it foreshadowed his future work as a new age artist. It's very different from his other albums during the early 70s.

Stoned Flute (1970)

I've had this LP for well over 20 years but I think it's only the second time for me to hear it. I had such high hopes for this when I first obtained it. That most awesome title and the fact that I was already an established Hinze fan. But this falls to the free jazz side of the equation. It's not unpleasant at all, with plenty of standup bass and piano along with Hinze's flute. Everyone once in awhile they'll catch a groove and you begin to think there might be something here to grasp onto. But then it falls apart per protocol. Lot of folks I know into this scene, but I'm just not one of them.

Former ownership: 1970 CBS (LP). Gatefold

3/3/03 (acquired); 1/7/25 (review)

Charlie Mariano with the Chris Combination (1973)

Straight up jazz session with American WWII veteran saxophonist Mariano joining forces with the Chris Hinze Combination from the Netherlands. This CD is a reissue of Charlie Mariano With The Chris Hinze Combination with the 18+ minute "bonus" title track improvisation thrown in the middle. Mariano himself was just taking baby steps into the European underground (see Osmosis for some American subversiveness) with jazz flutist Hinze's outfit. He was later to embark into an enlightening journey with Krautrock legends Embryo, and participate on some of their finest works shortly thereafter. 'Traditional South Indian (Carnatic) Kirtanam' is exactly the type of music he performed later with the underground Embryo. A real Hepcat, man.

Former ownership: CD: 1995 Black Lion (Germany) as Blue Stone. Booklet has original liner notes.

7/08/03 (acquired); 12/10/15 (review); 4/23/24

Other albums I own and need to review: Live at Montreux; Virgin Sacrifice; Mission Suite; Sister Slick

12/10/15 (new entry)

Mike's Top 30 Unreissued Titles (Part 4 of 6)

16. Chris Hinze Combination - Sister Slick One can not start a large list without expecting it to change even during the duration and this 70s Hinze album put an immediate dent in the top 30 with a first listen. Like Mission Suite, this is just titanic, intense, creative and energetic jazz rock in that early 70s idiom where the style hadn't quite crystallized into the quasi-Return to Forever-ish style it would in just a couple years ago, in fact this is actually kind of hard to compare to other jazz rock bands in that it manages to stay much more in the rock circle than many of its contemporaries. Very few new albums manage to bring this much grinning delight to my musical intake, it's the kind of record where it's difficult to do anything else as it just constantly begs for your attention due to the musical chemistry and their absolute mastery of the rise and fall of energy with playing. Honestly this is likely to chart a lot higher than 16 when all is said and done and could easily move up into my top 5. It's crazy to think that the only reissued album from this era is basically soundtrack music when there are monsters like this still in the vault. 

17. Emmanuel Booz - Dans Quel Etat J'Erre (Reissued by Musea 2011) Booz is now an actor, in fact I believe he starred in one of the Bourne movies, if I've got the IMDB citation correct, but over his long career he managed to get out four solo albums, starting with an early French version of Alice's Restaurant, likely to be lost on anyone not speaking the language, all the way up to this torturous and delirious progressive rock masterpiece, where finally the level of lyrics and vocals gets the right balance with twisted and incredibly well-played instrumental segments. It's a short one and I've forgotten the list of fairly high profile musicans who helped out with this, but it's also quite sweet, three tracks that you'd think Musea would have knocked off a long time ago, but like Ma Banlieue Flasque and Eider Stellaire this one's long overdue (and I'd throw his third Clochard in there for good measure as well, even if it would fall much lower on a list like this). 

18. Michel Madore - La Chambre Nuptiale Progressive rock fans, including my cohort here, prefer Madore's more overtly progressive rock first album, and while it's certainly a nice one, I think his second, electronic piece is the more overtly original and interesting of the two, with a view to the atmospheric and concept. Very different from the German styles so popular at the time and the French scene it was perhaps part of due to the label (Madore's Canadian), Madore drew more on concepts of musique concret to fashion the music and there's hints of Pierre Henry in this work as well as hints of Wendy Carlos Sonic Seasonings in there, with a combination of huge electronic soundscapes merged with found and recorded sounds. It's huge, heady, and somewhat mystical given that the concepts of marriage are often alchemical metaphors. And the production's a lot better than on the first as well, which doesn't hurt. Where the debut seems to be practically a predestined Prog Quebec release, the question is whether this one fits their agenda or not given it probably plays to a different or at least expanded audience. I'd call dibs on both. 

19. Von Zamla - No Make Up Apparently the live Cuneiform release was created as something of a substitute for No Make Up, with the idea that it was never destined to be a CD release, which would be a crying shame as it's be the best of the third incarnation of the Samla Mammas Manna family, in fact their best release since Familesprickor. To my ears there's just a lot more kinetic energy and tight compositions at work here and I don't think the live release quite rises to the level of the album except for in a couple spots. Perhaps a precursor to the Swiss band Nimal in some ways. 

20. Pinguin - Der Grosse Rot Vogel Superb German progressive rock album and a very different one as it diverts the usual expectations by being more English inspired than the usual German release but then does the same type of diversion by actually singing in their own native language rather than using English, perhaps making it one of the few albums from that country to create this kind of flip flop. I hear quite a bit of Canterbury in it which probably makes its closest cousins bands like Brainstorm or even the Tortilla Flat album I mentioned yesterday. Tom put up a review or blurb on this one recently on this blog or the reissue wish list blog, so there's little need to add to that, accept I think we're both in accord on getting this one out to the public.

Mike's Top 30 Unreissued Titles (Part 1 of 6)

I think periodically some of us old timer collectors with fetishes for lists need to sort out various things and it seems one of our old time favorite topics is the albums left unreissued on CD to date, in fact my cohort's got a pretty nice site of his own that covers this topic in a great bit of detail. My list's going to have a great deal of crossover with Tom's, although perhaps the main difference is that mine will verge a little more in the electronic and jazz directions. I'd have probably done something like this eventually, but it's been bumped up due to some ... talk. But anyway I thought I'd list my top 30 by fives. Almost the entire list is what we at Gnosis call "12s" except for this first 5 made up of two 14s and three 13s.

1. Lightwave - Ici et Maintenant

Ici et Maintenant was sort of an underground electronic music show in France and this Lightwave cassette, originally released by Audion's Auricle label was the third of three cassettes before they were signed to Erdenklang for their first original CD, Nachtmusik, and then went on to hop labels for their career. Lightwave have always exhibited a combination of 70s tendencies and musique concret sounds and always managed to pull off a lot of really dark and sequence driven music. Perhaps of all their work, this live, approximately 80-90m cassette music, is the most Berliner/70s sounding of their work, each phase of the music sort of segueing into the next in what always sounded to me like one long suite with some very notable sequencer sections. I'd always found ordering overseas in the 90s to be somewhat treacherous so had friends in Britain mail me this cassette at the time and I think I probably got a flawed copy with some tape warble towards the end of the first side/beginning of the second side, so to say this is my #1 reissue list even with those flaws is probably saying something. I think even those who might think of Lightwave more in the musique concret direction (and in this direction the cassete Cites Analogues is probably closest from these early days) might go for this. I don't know what's holding up any of these cassette releases, the band, the original label or whoever, but they all really deserve to see digital in more than CD-R format.

2. Gunter Schickert - Samtvogel (Reissued by Important 2013)

I always think of Schickert as the third in the trilogy of German guitarists with a thing for the echo pedals including Manuel Gottsching and Achim Reichel and really only Gottsching has managed to get all of his stuff out on CD. With Reichel and Schickert we've just had a smattering of activity, and this debut release (which started as a private release and then got released on Green Brain) is perhaps what I'd call the second best echo guitar album after Manuel's classic Inventions for Electric Guitar. This album's a lot darker though with huge swathes of music that seem a lot more abstract and thus maybe a step aside from the normal connection you'd make with the hippie era. I've always loved that all three of these guys have their own personalities with the style but find it sad that Schickert's most notable groundbreaking effort is still in the vaults. And will the SPV series not be able to include this due to its initial private release? Curious and curiouser. 

3. Atila - Reviure  (Reissued by Belle Antique 2019)

The recent reissue of Intencion with a live version of Reviure really speaks volumes for the absence of the true Reviure on a digital CD and it seems we may never see it, in what I refer to as "major level oblivion." (I think there's some comments about why in the Intencion CD but I'm not near my copy). This is not only a high want for me on the unreissued list but it might be the best Spanish progressive rock album of all time, if not top 5. It's not really part of all the folk/flamenco-influenced rock of the 70s and more like a jammin' space rock masterpiece. And even though the vocals can occasionally make me wince, the music's still too good for them to overwhelm it. In some ways Spain's answer to Gong and Hawkwind, four nearly perfect tracks. Although I must say, given the vinyl quality, that I probably wouldn't suffice with more than going back to the masters, so if they're gone then we probably have the best we're going to get.

4. Ma Banlieue Flasque - st

Word was that Musea had this one in their reissue plans, but then they've always started their reissue lists earlier than everyone else with some albums seeing as much as a decade from the original mention to when they actually show up. From what I understand this is because albums like this do a pittance in the community and thus funds are needed to collect before what is virtually a labor of love is needed to release it. In fact given so many French/Belgian rarities are starting to show up in Japan now, such as the Speed Limits, Art Zoyds and Julvernes, maybe this one will finally follow. It's part of the whole rippin' delirium tradition, roughly in the vein of Zappa, Komintern, early Gong and Etron Fou, with a lot of crazy words mixed in with some thoroughly complex and highly energetic playing. Another one where I don't see what the hold up is at this point. My guess this is the least problematic of the items in this post.

5. Chris Hinze Combination - Mission Suite

The newest entry on my list and I suppose this could sink a bit after the initial excitement, this early 70s jazz rock combo really did a number on this release working those rise and fall dynamics like the pros they were, starting off quietly with loads of wondrous flute and then bringing up the energy like kundalini to peak over and over again. It just goes to show you there's still a crazy number of early 70s jazz rock albums to do, again probably part of the major label hold up. And apparently Hinze has a bunch of em.