We Keep On

We Keep On is the German art/jazz rock band Embryo's most successful recording. It's also one of their best. In late 1972, saxophonist Charlie Mariano joined Embryo along with guitarist Roman Bunka. Mariano's already encyclopedic knowledge of world music forms was a welcome addition to the band; they sought to fuse jazz and space rock -- a la their countrymen Can -- with the various rhythms and harmonic sensibilities of folk musics across the globe. Bunka also played the Turkish saz and was a great, if unconventional, vocalist. Embryo's leader, Christian Burchard, took up everything from drums to marimba to Mellotron on this set to complement pianist Dieter Miekautsch's Rhodes and clavinet work. And Mariano played not only sax and flute but nagasuram and bamboo flutes as well. Here, on "Ehna, Ehna, Abu Lele," West African rhythms danced with jazz rock and wove something entirely new from the roots of both. On "Hackbrett-Dance," saz, marimba, and percussion became something out of time and space that might have come from any North African nation, but found a place in the tripped-out world of psychedelic space music as well -- check the recordings of Angus MacLise for a frame of reference here. But it is on the Miles-influenced jazz-funk of "No Place to Go," which used the Jack Johnson groove to achieve new rock ecstasies, that the album really comes into view for its revolutionary contribution to the language of assimilation. The CD version also contains two welcome bonus tracks from the session, a nearly 16-minute "Ticket to India" and an eight-and-a-half-minute extended improv called "Flute, Saz and Marimba" that could have come from one of Don Cherry's early-'70s recordings. Highly recommended. ~ Thom Jurek