Brass Trax

What makes the Soft Machine so weird? It’s a pertinent question to ask, if you’re just hearing the band for the first time. Many subsequent experimental music acts claim Soft Machine as an influence, from any given Krautrocker to Oneida, but who influenced Soft Machine? Indeed, it’s easy to throw up your hands and say that the band is so completely sui generis that it has no clear precursors. But, of course, that’s not entirely true.

Soft Machine was the product of the same remarkable cultural shift that gave us electric Miles Davis and Jimi Hendrix, the moment when the formalistic silos that held different genres of music suddenly collapsed and rock, jazz, blues, Indian music, and modern classical could mix with whatever happened to be on the turntable. Like Hendrix and Miles, Soft Machine had an interest in modal harmony as a basis for free improvisation. Unlike them, Soft Machine never found commercial success.

The band started in Canterbury, east of London, where drummer Robert Wyatt, bassists Kevin Ayers and Hugh Hopper, guitarist Daevid Allen, and keyboardist Mike Ratledge liked to listen to jazz records together. In 1966, after playing in a variety of configurations, including a rock band (Wilde Flowers) and a jazz trio (Daevid Allen Trio), Wyatt, Ayers, Allen, and Ratledge formed the Soft Machine, moved to London, and started jamming on the psychedelic underground with fellow travelers like the newly formed Pink Floyd. (Hopper would join Soft Machine several years later, after Ayers left the band.) The years 1966 to 1969 saw the great flourishing of British psychedelia, which quickly left the underground and its credibility behind. Unlike Pink Floyd, which parlayed its underground success into a long-lasting career in the mainstream, Soft Machine switched directions, preferring to emphasize the austerity of jazz over the pleasures of pop.

The band’s first recording, Soft Machine Volume 1 (1968), offers a glimpse at this conception. The album was recorded in New York while the band was opening for Jimi Hendrix on a North American tour. At the time, the band’s repertoire was heavy on Kevin Ayers compositions, which came draped in recognizably psychedelic vestments. Typical Ayers tracks like “We Did it Again” or “Why Are We Sleeping” modulate between two or three chords with a lackadaisical drone—the template for Krautrock bands like Faust. Robert Wyatt, the lyricist and singer, weaves words around the drone that, dippy and intermittent as they are, tie the whole jam together. Of particular interest is the pseudo-autobiographical “Why Am I So Short?” in which we learn that Wyatt loves “to smoke and drink and ball,” despite, or perhaps because of his diminutive height.

Listen to “Why Are We Sleeping?”
Listen to “Why Am I So Short?”

When Soft Machine cut its first record, the seams in the band were already beginning to show. Kevin Ayers left the group shortly afterward, frustrated that his artistic vision didn’t square with the new, jazzier direction in which Wyatt and Ratledge were traveling. Hugh Hopper joined the band in Ayer’s role, and the result was a complete transformation in the music. For one thing, Hugh’s brother, Brian Hopper, joined on tenor saxophone, taking the lead part in many songs from the organist. Hugh Hopper’s bass playing preserved nuances in timbre while still managing to be mind-meltingly bombastic. And Wyatt’s drum chops, already impressive, had improved such that he didn’t merely play jazz charts, he could also improvise on them with alacrity.

Indeed, Wyatt’s drumming on Volume 2 (1969) is downright cheerful, even as his vocals have a newfound soulfulness that hints at the depressing music he would make later in his life. The album was a transition record, retaining the nugget of pop song structure while verging into ever more abstract realms of jazz improvisation. Thematically, the album also has a new element, based in the history of western avant garde art. From the “Pataphysical Introduction,” a reference to the “pataphysics” of French playright Alfred Jarry, to “Dada Was Here,” the reference for which is obvious, Soft Machine built a wall between itself and its history in popular culture.

Listen to “Pataphysical Introduction”
Listen to “Dada Was Here”

By Third, the final great Soft Machine album, the band had given up rock for all intents and purposes. The 1970 double album featured only four compositions, one for each side of the record. It was the second-to-last outing for Wyatt, whose particular artistic enthusiasms—fusion—put him at odds with jazz-minded Hopper and Ratledge. In fact, the schism was so pronounced that each of the four tracks carried the name of only one composer, which was highly unusual for Soft Machine.

Wyatt didn’t just write “Moon in June”; he also played most of the instruments on the track himself. It was the last Soft Machine song to contain vocals, and it was by all accounts a medley of older material, something like Wyatt’s last sigh with the band, exhaling anything he’d kept held in hitherto.

Listen to “Moon in June”

For many though, the centerpiece of the album, and its best track, remains “Out-Bloody-Rageous,” credited to Ratledge. Beginning with a series of tape loops—shades of In a Silent Way, but also of the minimalist avant garde—it soon shifts into a jazz jam, anchored by Ratledge’s insistent keyboard line and simultaneously unfettered by Wyatt’s drumming, which can be described only as completely bananas. True fusion jazz, it also demonstrates the group at its finest, locked into a tight interplay that nonetheless leaves room for the capacious egos behind the instruments.

Listen to “Out-Bloody-Rageous”

Soft Machine’s efforts flagged after Wyatt left; the same chemistry wasn’t there. As for Wyatt, he had something of an amazing solo career, which will be the subject of a later column.

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