It is not often that a gig begins with the unexpected announcement that one of the group’s members died that morning. Sadly, the saxophonist Elton Dean, who had been billed to appear alongside guitarist John Etheridge, bass player Hugh Hopper and drummer John Marshall, had passed away in hospital at the age of 60 after a prolonged period of ill health. Hopper broke the news: “He certainly wouldn’t have been gloomy; we’ll play for him.”
It was not the most auspicious start to this low-key revival of the Soft Machine brand, which continues tonight. But jazz musicians are a notoriously unsentimental bunch, and with Theo Travis deputising for Dean they were soon laying into the sinuous bop-funk groove of Ash, the title track of an old Etheridge album that actually had little to do with Soft Machine per se.
While Etheridge, Hopper and Marshall are all bona fide alumni of Soft Machine, they are but a handful of the small army of musicians who, between 1966 and 1978, passed through Britain’s most celebrated progressive/jazz fusion group. They were billed as Soft Machine Legacy to deflect possible objections from other former members. But as the evening unfolded it became clear that the gig was more legacy than Soft Machine.
Indeed, only three Soft Machine numbers surfaced all night: Facelift and Kings and Queens, both written by Hopper, and a voyage round the riff of the Mike Ratledge composition As If. The Hopper numbers, which allied crude, cyclical bass riffs with high-velocity soloing of stunning virtuosity, especially from Etheridge, were closest to the swashbuckling spirit of Soft Machine.
There were also glorious moments during As If, when Marshall produced rolling cannonades around his kit while Hopper anchored the song to a bass line as secure as a battleship chain. But these were tantalising glimpses of a musical history that was mostly untouched.
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