Bonus “Friends.”

Marc Cohen Copland: electronic alto saxphone, tenor saxophone
Glen Moore: electric & electricfied acoustic bass
Jeff Williams: drums

Recorded May 3, 1972, in Studio 3, WKCR-FM, Ferris Booth Hall, Columbia University, New York for David Reitman’s “Journey to the End of the Night,” by Fred Seibert & Don Zimmerman

Here are the bonus tracks I’ve been promising to the Marc Cohen Copland’s “Friends” LP. They pre-date the “Friends” sessions by some seven months, but this session was why I wanted to make the record in the first place. No one knew what was in store for us this May night in 1972, but I, for one, heard something I’d never forget. “Fusion” had been in the air for a few years, but Marc was one of the very few that actually merged the harmonic and rhythmic truths and jazz with rock.  

For those of us who were jazzically inclined at Columbia in the late 60s, alto saxophonist/composer Marc Cohen Copland was a legend. I’d seen him perform with the Chico Hamilton Quartet, and engineered a recording of his big band at a campus auditorium, but we hadn’t really met until my pal David Reitman had Marc play on his radio show with a trio in the spring of 1972. As usual, I was engineering the live radio shot, and the first tune was a slightly more radical than mainstream outing. But when bassist Glen Moore was playing a long introduction to his Three Step Dance, Marc started fiddling with a guitar amplifier and Echoplex, and things started getting a little wild. If I closed my eyes I would have thought some kind of electric rock guitar had snuck in.

The next medley clinched it. Marc had gone completely out there. Not in the avant-garde jazz way I was starting to like, but somewhere further. It was liked he’d taken Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew and The Tony Williams Lifetime, and crossed it over with some of Cream or Hendrix or something. Actually, that’s not accurate. The truth is I didn’t know what the hell I was hearing, but I really liked it. We all did. The set list had some more familiar territory, but when it was all over the only thing remembered was the new sounds. They were certainly seared into my ears.

Almost 40 years later, I can’t tell you whether I approached Marc about releasing the tapes that same night, or whether it was in the days afterwards. Tom and I had just started Oblivion, but our releases were Tom’s blues passions and I was itching to document my side of the quarry. I figured it would be on the avant tip, but this session was incendiary to me and unlike anything in the world. We’d be the first with something, a real break for a tiny indie label. We’d call it “electronic jazz” (fusion was a term that came with the inevitable popularity), and it wasn’t until a couple of years later that it turned into music that we’d never listen to again.

Downer! Marc didn’t like the sessions, for reasons he never explained to me, but he was willing to come back later in the year with a quartet (adding his friend, electric guitarist John Abercrombie). We agreed, and made the date in December. 

To be perfectly honest, I wasn’t that turned on by the master sessions, certainly not like on these takes. But, I didn’t have enough confidence to listen to the original sessions again and demand the better performances. (Just compare this “5/8 Tune” with the one on the released album. Or “Loose Tune”, May and December.)

I always thought the lack of absolute magic might have something to do with the final reaction to the album. A lot of progressive reviewers liked it, but the public never warmed. Some thought it was my choice for the cover, others thought it was ahead of its time. But, as I listen to these “demos” again for the first time in four decades, I think it was really the ‘X’ factor, that thing that separates the unique and different from the special.