Recorded in 1972 and released in 1973 with
Herbie Hancock
,
Stanley Clarke
, and
Jack DeJohnette
Joe Farrell
's
Moon Germs
was a foray into the electric side of
jazz
. On the opener,
"Great George,"
Farrell
leads off with the hint of a melody before careening into legato streams of thought along striated intervallic paths.
DeJohnette
is like a machine gun, quadruple-timing the band as
Clarke
moves against the grain in a series of fours and eights, and
Hancock
's attempts to keep the entire thing anchored are almost for naught. On the title track there is more of a
funk
backdrop, but the complex, angular runs and insane harmonic reaches
attempts on his soprano, crack, falter, and ultimately turn into something else; the sheer busy-ness of the track is dazzling.
"Bass Folk Song"
by
, is the only thing on the record that actively engages melody rather than harmonic structures.
uses his flute and
strides into the same kind of territory he explored with
Miles Davis
, chopping up chordal phrases into single lines and feeding them wholesale to the running pair of frontmen--in this case
and
.
uses a
Latin
backdrop to hang his drumming on and pursues a circular, hypnotic groove on the cymbals and toms. It's a gorgeous piece of music and utilizes an aspect of space within the melodic frame that the rest of these firebrand tunes do not. This is sci-fi
at his creative best. ~ Thom Jurek