Renaissance

Name: Renaissance – Scheherazade And Other Stories
Item: Scheherazade And Other Stories
Author: Federico Romagnoli

Scheherazade And Other Stories

1975 (Btm)

progressive folk, progressive rock

by Federico Romagnoli

Among the historic bands of the British progressive rock scene, Renaissance have one of the most curious stories.

They rise from the ashes of the Yardbirds, at the behest of singer Keith Relf and drummer Jim McCarthy, who have almost total control over the first two albums. The public's indifference, however, leads to a rapid breakup, and when manager Miles Copeland III decides to reorganize them, a completely different band emerges.

There isn't a single shared member between 1971's "Illusion" and 1972's "Prologue". The only name appearing in both is Michael Dunford, on one hand as guitarist on a track, on the other as arranger and main songwriter. He is, however, not an official member of either.

In reality, the transition was more gradual than it appears when simply reading the two lineups. McCarthy, for instance, left the project as a musician but remained available as a lyricist, while the two key members of the new lineup, keyboardist John Tout and singer Annie Haslam, had been recruited to support the band live while the two Yardbirds members were still on board.

It's unclear why the name wasn't changed, especially considering there was no commercial advantage in keeping an unknown moniker. Somehow, the new group was also presented as Renaissance, and it would soon win over its own share of the audience.

Whether or not the obscurity surrounding the first incarnation of Renaissance is deserved, there's no doubt that the second lineup produced albums of historic scope, capable of leaving a deep mark on the most aristocratic side of rock music.

On the eve of their fifth album, "Scheherazade And Other Stories", the lineup had finally stabilized. Alongside Tout and Haslam were bassist Jon Camp, drummer Terence Sullivan, and the long-awaited Dunford on acoustic guitar: the man who effectively wrote most of the band's music was finally a full member of it.

Their rise continued unabated: although they'd have to wait a few more years to be noticed at home, 1974 brought them their first entry into the American top 100, with the album "Turn Of The Cards". The band had built a small but fervent cult following on the East Coast of the United States, which they aimed to expand, given that the American market was far more lucrative than the one back home.

No expense was spared for the new record: production was handled by David Hitchcock (fresh off "Mirage" by the Camel), orchestral arrangements by Tony Cox (who had already worked on early material by Caravan, Family and Yes), and the cover was entrusted to Hipgnosis.

The result is a record that pushes the evocative power of Renaissance's music to its peak, with architectures given boundless room to breathe. The tracks stretch out, culminating in a suite that takes up the entire second side, an experiment the band had never attempted before. The sound hasn't changed much from "Turn Of The Cards", but the storytelling has become more expansive, richer and more ambitious. It's the difference between a fine noir film and "Casablanca".

The first thing that stands out is the absence of electric guitar, replaced by an acoustic one that prefers to weave textures into the background rather than take centre stage. The lion's share of the work instead falls to Tout's piano (baroque in touch, though capable of jazzy shadings) and the orchestral arrangements, seamlessly integrated with the rhythm section. Camp's bass is lush, tracing lines that only rarely settle for simply keeping time, favouring instead an approach in the style of Yes's Chris Squire.

Without electric guitar, the symphonic component fills the empty spaces, and at more than one point the music comes within a hair's breadth of classical music, more so than progressive rock usually does. Balancing this out, however, is the folk element, provided less by the acoustic guitar than by Haslam's voice, angelic and steeped in an arcane charm, in the best tradition of the great British female singers of the genre (from Jacqui McShee of Pentangle to Maddy Prior of Steeleye Span). Jazz finds its own space too, not only - as already mentioned - through the piano, but also in the use of certain chords, in some of the jagged excursions of Sullivan's drumming, and in the occasional use of a xylophone.

In short, there's so much going on here that there's no time left to miss the absence of distortion.

The album opens with "Trip To The Fair". As always, the lyrics were written by poet Betty Thatcher, the band's longtime collaborator and friend. Haslam had told her about a date of his that ended comically with a pointless trip to a fair that turned out to be closed. Rather than treating it as a funny anecdote, Thatcher took it as inspiration to stage a genuine nightmare.

That the atmosphere is far from friendly is clear from the outset, with an anxious piano theme that kicks in and builds over martial rhythms and grim choral interjections. There's no shortage of diabolical laughter and a music-box motif, staples of any self-respecting gothic tale.

Haslam enters, singing of her arrival at the fair. In Thatcher's script, however, the singer is unaccompanied. The solitude within an already subtly unsettling setting — a deserted fairground — fills the air with tension. The only possible epilogue is a desperate flight, once the bumper cars and the ferris wheel have started up. "I closed my eyes to hide the fear inside me, shaking with my own mind I found no place to hide. Tomorrow's stars shine through the grey mist that has gone. I wish this trip to the fair had never begun."

Not just a perfect vignette of old-school horror, but an existential metaphor for the fear of tomorrow and the uncertainties of life. It all fades out — in a sardonically fitting touch — on the repetition of a circus theme.

"The Vultures Fly High" is a three-minute vignette, sophisticated baroque pop with the piano hammering away relentlessly. Haslam sings of the cruelty of the vultures that prey on us and have the final say over our lives. It's not entirely clear who she's referring to (the government, the media, or society at large with its constant thirst for judgement?), but ultimately it hardly matters.

"Ocean Gypsy" is a romantic ballad that opens out into instrumental digressions, before the finale makes room for the usual choirs and strings, synthetic this time around. It's vaguely reminiscent of the equally splendid "Ripples", by the Genesis, which would come out the following year.

The second side of the vinyl is taken up entirely by the suite "Song Of Scheherazade". Made up of nine fragments (each with its own subtitle), woven together by recurring motifs that blend it seamlessly, it runs almost twenty-five minutes.

Thatcher sets Scheherazade's story to verse, closely following "One Thousand and One Nights". For obvious reasons of time, alongside the relationship between the girl and the sultan, only one of the many tales-within-a-tale that characterize the original work is narrated.

A brief brass fanfare, almost a foretaste of what would later become the "Zelda" soundtracks, serves as the introduction. The sultan soon discovers he has been betrayed by one of his wives. The music is agitated, aiming to convey the man's emotional turmoil.

The first sung section is "The Sultan". To give the plot more depth, the character's introduction is entrusted to Camp's voice. Haslam still comes in briefly to double him and steer the arrangement toward an epic surge of choirs, strings, flutes and gong. After killing every new wife on their wedding night to vent the rage of the wrong done to him, the sultan meets Scheherazade, who enchants him and saves herself by telling him a long series of stories and legends.

A gentle piano theme and a delicate ballad, in which a harp also appears, blend one into the other for the tale of a prince and a princess who fall in love, a story Scheherazade uses to work her way into the sultan's heart.

The next fragment, "Festival Preparations", suggests that the attempt has succeeded. The city awakens with a slow orchestral crescendo, in classic tradition, while the news of the wedding and the festival preparations are marked by a frenetic, opulent section, where oriental-tinged themes overlap, swirling horns, tireless vibraphones, shouting voices and countless "la la la"s pile up. An airy fugue for piano and horns, dedicated to the sultan, shows the change in his spirit.

Haslam's voice takes centre stage again to tell of the city and the sultan celebrating Scheherazade, until the return of the "The Sultan" theme leads to a triumphant close, with the choir more majestic than ever and Haslam raising her pitch with every reprise, in a manifesto to fullness and abundance, to the beauty of life and of music.

It's not uncommon these days to see the story of "One Thousand and One Nights" criticised for its cruelty: the sultan has brutally killed an unspecified number of women, yet it's all wiped clean as he repents and celebrates. But this is simply one of the many paradoxes of taking things out of context: it's a work whose origins date back to around 900 AD, and even if it were modern, it ought to be read metaphorically. One can draw from it a warning about what man is capable of when he fails to master his own instincts, a celebration of the figure of the woman who manages, through intelligence, to outwit brute force and power, an invitation not to be wary of love no matter how much it may have hurt in the past. Or an invitation to translate all of this into a track spanning an entire side of vinyl, sealing the final chapter of the golden age of British progressive rock.

"Scheherazade And Other Stories", with its wealth of intricate songs and superb instrumental breaks, effectively marks a peak in the interpolation between a rock band and an orchestra, achieving a naturalness rarely matched elsewhere. As if that weren't enough, its sound crystalline sound and the balance of every instrument stand as a milestone in production and sound engineering.

Granted, the Renaissance's stylistic signature would remain an isolated case - not for lack of appreciation, since the album actually managed to break into the Billboard top 50, but rather due to the practical difficulty of reproducing its ideas and dynamics.

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08/04/2018

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This article is an English translation of the original Italian text by Federico Romagnoli, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.

Read the original in Italian · About the English edition