Return To Forever - Hymn of the Seventh Galaxy (1973)
1. Hymn of the Seventh Galaxy
2. After the Cosmic Rain
3. Captain Senor Mouse
4. Theme to the Mothership
5. Space Circus
6. The Game Maker
Chick Corea, electric piano, acoustic piano, organ, harpsichord, gongs; Stanley Clarke, electric bass, fuzz bass, bell-tree; Bill Connors, electric guitar, acoustic guitar; Lenny White, drums, percussion, congas, bongos.
Hymn of the Seventh Galaxy
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After Chick Corea's first incarnation of Return to Forever fell apart in 1973, he decided to change the direction of the music entirely and go for a jazz-rock fusion sound. He retained the services of guitarist Bill Connors and drummer Steve Gadd. They played a few shows and recorded an album but Gadd, a session drummer, soured on the prospect of touring and quit the band. Gadd was replaced by Lenny White, who impressed Corea enough to send the whole band back into the studio to re-record the album. That album was the great Hymn of the Seventh Galaxy. While I believe that Corea had something very special with his earlier band and find it unfortunate they could not have remained together long enough to make more records, Hymn of the Seventh Galaxy temporarily makes it hard to complain.
Using the hyper-kinetic, turn-on-a-dime sound of early Mahavishnu Orchestra as a model, Hymn of the Seventh Galaxy is a grand behemoth of a fusion album. Although Bill Connors earns his stripes (I actually prefer his sound to his successor, Al DiMeola), this is still Chick Corea's show — his prominence on the album is one of the main factors that differentiated these two bands. Each tune exhibits great technical virtuosity, yet they're all full of catchy riffs and melodies and I find the album to be very accessible. Lenny White distinguishes himself as an excellent drummer for this band — he's rock oriented but extremely nimble and he handles the frenetic pace and frequent time changes with a crisp authority. Additionally, he has enough bluster to complement the band's high-octane approach.
It's hard to pick the stand-out tracks here because they're all excellent and all fairly similar to each other in terms of construction and sound; there's no "Lotus on Irish Streams" to break up the mood, unless you count the solo piano during the opening 90 seconds of "Space Circus." I can say that Stanley Clarke's "After the Cosmic Rain" is probably the most "composed" piece on the album and it has a main theme that I might consider grandiloquent in most other contexts, but which strikes me here as chillingly appealing. Not necessarily so for the uninitiated — a few minutes of it in my car once prompted my brother to complain "what is this crap – is this Yes?" — but what the hell does he know? On "Captain Senor Mouse," Corea adds some of the Latin flavor that infused the earlier version of Return to Forever, and the track has a great guitar solo. The album ends on an appropriately blistering note: "The Game Maker" starts slow and builds to an ecstatic coda, featuring an energetic passage of call and response riffing between Corea and Connors.
This whole album has a powerful, organic sound and any fusion fan who has not heard it should probably do so as soon as possible. I consider it to be one of the great 1970s fusion albums.
many thanks - an album I should have heard years ago but somehow always missed out on.
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