Third Ear Band - Music for the Third Ear

“Our rhythms come from all over the planet. We use these rhythms, and a thousand other ideas, to create the music of a new world”

(Glen Sweeney, leader of Third Ear Band)

1968, and the revolutions of students and workers. Woodstock, and the dreams of hippies and pacifists. The Age of Aquarius, spiritualism, East meeting West. It was in that fertile, complex era that a group of virtuoso London musicians, performing in underground clubs, dreamed up a new sonic order. A universal language, built from the words of distant and different alphabets: Indian classical music, Egyptian and Chinese legends, Celtic folk. And yet, this ambitious project was entrusted to music that was entirely instrumental.

"Sometimes, words are an obstacle to communication"

(Glen Sweeney)

The Third Ear ensemble took shape in 1967, in the heart of London's Ufo Club, first under the name Sun Giant Trolley, then Hydrogen Juke Box, and finally Third Ear Band, in homage to the "third ear", the sensory element capable of opening the doors of perception. Percussionist Glen Sweeney and Paul Minns, with his notorious oboe, formed the stable, lasting core of the group. Joining them were the exuberant violist Richard Coff and the brilliant cellist Mel Davis.

The musical encounter between East and West was certainly no sudden flash of inspiration for the group. As early as 1955, with sarod player Ali Akbar Khan's New York concert, a certain Indophile craze had already taken hold. From there came the explosion of raga-rock in the Sixties, with singles such as "See My Friends" by the Kinks or "Eight Miles High" by the Byrds, perfectly in step with hippie esotericism. Jazz, too, had traveled the Silk Road, with the 1962 collection "Improvisations", or with an experiment whose only redeeming feature was, unfortunately, its title: "West meets Est". 1962 had also already seen an entire album devoted to the fusion of the two worlds: "East West" by blues singer Paul Butterfield.

The Third Ear Band's truly great insights, however, lay elsewhere: abandoning every form of rock, blues, folk and jazz in search of entirely new sonorities; transcending, in an almost anthropological way, the banal East-West dichotomy. In practice, Third Ear Band's music is neither an ethnic stew nor a jazz-fusion experiment. Instead, it embodies an ideology. It preaches a primordial unity of humankind, present at the dawn of time and forgotten by the present. In this sense, those far-sighted London lads helped found world music, ranking among the sacred monsters of that era, their influence extending unquestionably across the entire history of sonic art.

"We can offer an entire dream. The ancient Celtic bards had the same ability"

(Glen Sweeney)

Naturally, the quartet's success was far more muted than that of the other giants of progressive rock, such as King Crimson, Genesis, Yes, Van Der Graaf Generator, or the enchanted rock of Popol Vuh. Hence, perhaps, the group's marked tendency toward self-celebration. The fact that their songs are hardly cult hits stems from the delicate technical-musical approach taken by Sweeney and co. Rejecting rationally structured composition (the emblem of Western musical thought, from Mozart to Bob Dylan), these adventurous musicians played chamber rock through two kinds of improvisation, free-jazz and Indian alike, leaving the European ear thoroughly disoriented. They also frequently replaced intricate bass lines with the drone, borrowed from Eastern meditative tradition. This is a harmonic effect in which a note or chord is played repeatedly or sustained, laid beneath the melody: a technique already employed by certain classical composers (such as Haydn, Berlioz or Bartók) to recreate archaic, folk-like atmospheres.

From Europe, though, the Londoners carried with them the idea of the concept album and instruments (oboe, viola, cello) renowned in the Western tradition. In particular, the reserved Paul Minns, the group's oboist, was among the first to play non-Western scales and melodies on his instrument. Given these credentials, perhaps we can forgive percussionist Glen Sweeney's lack of modesty in interviews and press conferences.

"99 per cent of our music is improvisation"

(Glen Sweeney)

Alchemy, the band's debut studio album, arrived in 1969. It is an alchemy of spiritualism, tribalism, meditative relaxation and metaphysical transcendence, performed beautifully and delightfully on acoustic instruments. Given the natural ease with which it preaches the overcoming of spatial and cultural barriers between peoples, it could well be the manifesto of world music. Scanning the song titles conjures up evocative images: the ancient Egyptians' Book of the Dead, Jewish sacredness, China, Ireland. The music follows the color of the words that name its long suites. Thus we move from the mystical free jazz of "Egyptian Book Of The Dead" to the Chinese festival of gongs, bells and medieval strings in "Dragon Lines". "Mosaic", for its part, opens both the album and the history of Third Ear Band, with tablas sketching an ancestral atmosphere, where the stringed instruments intertwine within the dark, Arabian wind of the oboe.

Elements closer to earth and passion, on the other hand, are the jaw harp that animates the terrible, raw "Area III" and the deep dissonances of "Druid One". "Stone Circle" and the extraordinary "Ghetto Raga" (in which Indian ragas even find themselves dancing to the rhythm of the tarantella!) are instead the tracks that best reveal a cyclical conception of time, diametrically opposed to the linear Western one: every crescendo, every phrase, never truly ends, but humbly returns to perpetual motion, without claiming any glory.

"The vibrations of the planets can only be heard through the third ear: silence"

(Glen Sweeney)

Third Ear Band, the quartet's most famous record, generally regarded as one of the masterpieces of psychedelic, progressive and avant-garde music, arrived just a year later, with the alluring Ursula Smith replacing Mel Davis on cello. A concept album as perfect as a circle, singing with a universal sound the four fundamental elements of ancient pre-Socratic Greek philosophy: Air, Water, Fire, Earth. The ethnic element is now almost unrecognizable, perhaps because it had been fully internalized by the group, ready to draw on the sounds of the world to express an idea: a moral music, a social metaphysics of equality and beauty, denied by the hypocrisy of a consumerist world.

Third Ear Band stands miles apart from the clichés of popular music, but also from the basic tenets of jazz and classical music. “Air” is an esoteric cycle steeped in twelve-tone technique, where the improvisations of the four musicians form an ethereal, elusive counterpoint, like clouds. The march of “Earth” answers back agitated, warlike and earthbound: here the rhythmic bed, at once gypsy-like and pastoral, is a steady, cadenced crescendo, driving the exhausted swirls and trills of strings and winds. Like noble hostages of some music thief, the instruments come to imitate Native American chants, before sinking back into the timelessness of legend.

“Fire” is an orgy. An orgy that is both sacred and diabolical, depicting a profane, Arabic, medieval chaos, dissonant and uneven, with African percussion, wise and tribal, giving meaning to the blaze of acoustic flames. “Water” closes the cycle. It opens with an ambient touch: the sound of waves, sampled (an obvious device today, far less so back then). From there, limpid as the lunar surface, the oboe's free melody speaks to the meaning of seas and oceans, surrounded by the deep, magical musings of viola and cello, adrift like a boat heading for the horizon.

“The music is that of the druids. Each piece is like a blade of grass, or a cloud”

(from the programme of a 1969 concert)

Also in 1970 the ensemble recorded Abelard and Heloise, a soundtrack with medieval overtones for a German fiction production. The album would only be released 30 years later, alongside two 1972 works: The Magus, in which the group encounters electronics and vocals, as on the gem “I The Key”, and Prophecies, put out by Sweeney and three other members under the name “Sweeney's Hydrogen Juke Box”.

An important step for the band's popularity came with Music From Macbeth, commissioned by none other than Roman Polanski for his staging of Shakespeare's play. This time Minns and Sweeney teamed up with cellist Paul Buckmaster, who had already worked with David Bowie and Elton John, and guitarist Denim Bridges. Having abandoned the acoustic, ethnic and free-jazz dimension, the four focus on sixteen short avant-garde compositions. They evoke medieval dances, as in “Inverness” and “Court Dance”, or the songs of court jesters, as in the romantic “Flence”.

Obviously there's no comparison with the earlier works, not least because the intent here is entirely different. The pieces are, however, genuinely well played, in no way forbidding, certainly influential within the folk scene, and they introduced Third Ear Band to a much wider audience.

After 1972, the group disbanded. It vanished without fanfare, despite having laid down a fundamental and evocative stone in the mosaic of rock history.

“Third Ear Band's new album, 'Magic Music', is about music as pure vibration”

(Glen Sweeney)

A full fifteen years later, the lords of world music were rediscovered, dusted off and, above all, understood by the young devotees of the new age era. So it was that in 1988, with Allen Samuel on violin and Mick Carter on guitar, Live Ghosts was recorded. The album, combining studio and live material, marks the band's encounter with Italy and the label Materiali Sonori.

In that sunny Mediterranean boot, Magic Music was also born: the band's true comeback. Joining the inseparable duo are violinist Neil Black and the saxophonist who had already played with Nick Drake and Soft Machine: Lyn Dobson. Free jazz returns across these five lengthy tracks, as do the nightmares of ethnic nights, but with an extra electronic edge. The eloquent “New Age Raga” spells out the stylistic meaning of the group's comeback, alongside “Third Ear Raga”. In “Behind The Pyramids”, for instance, the ethnic trance of the Middle Eastern oboe improvises over a tightly defined, cyclical core of percussion, electronics and strings. That core is akin to the Indian raga, a technique that has always accompanied Third Ear Band, but which here becomes the cultural backbone of the second half of their career. Indeed, a raga, meaning “colour”, is the basic unit of a piece of Indian classical music, around which improvisation unfolds. There are countless ragas, but none were composed schematically: they came into being much like ancient epics, handed down from generation to generation. The goal is to induce a state of trance. Once again Sweeney and Minns pursue a moral purpose, far removed from the commercial, consumerist world of show business, fusing Indian spirituality with rock music.

“The free ragas we play hold emotions within them. Every note can be seen as a sound-colour that radiates an emotion”

(Glen Sweeney)

Brian Waves, from 1993, is produced as a quintet: Minns on oboe, Sweeney on percussion, Mick Carter on guitar, Samuel on violin and Lyn Dobson on saxophone. The record is a happy fusion of ambient experimentation, free jazz and jazz-rock. The concept of the raga returns (“Alchemical Raga”), but the new line-up delivers tracks that feel distinctly material and tied to the sonic waves of the Nineties (as on “Spell Of The Wodoo”).

1997 also brought New Age Magical Music. The style still wavers between jazz and ambient, but with an approach more futuristic and sci-fi than ethnic. Many tracks, like the stellar, escapist “Midnight on Mars”, carry an imposing evocative and sonic power, testament to the virtuosic greatness and artistic seriousness of Minns and Sweeney after years of career. The album's obvious social touchstone is new age culture.

1997, however, is also the year Paul Minns died, and he should be remembered as one of the boldest, most innovative and inspired oboists of all time. Only then did the duo break apart, and only then did the story of the third ear come to its close.

“Third Ear Band's music is a meditation on the universe…”

(Glen Sweeney)

All that's left to do, then, is listen. Perhaps with the third ear.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google