Annette Peacock

Skin-tight flared trousers and a bikini of another era: that's how a thirty-year-old Annette Peacock had herself immortalized during the recording sessions for "I'm The One". Judging by the setting, the pose and the look, it could be a still from Tarantino's Death Proof. But no: it's 1972, and that's the RCA Studios in New York. A sensuous, aggressive silhouette reclines - voluptuous as a modern Venus de Milo - along the edges of a Moog synthesizer. Part fairy, part panther, who knows how many men lost their heads at the sight of those sinuous curves! Many, perhaps countless, including two apostles of free jazz, Gary Peacock and Paul Bley, respectively the first and second husband of the fascinating Annette.

What shaped her as a musician were precisely the cultural circles of the New York New Thing and avant-garde scene: in the early Sixties she was touring with Albert Ayler, while by the decade's end she received, straight from Robert Moog himself, a prototype of his eponymous modular synthesizers. With it, Annette embarked on an intense phase of experimentation that, after "Revenge" recorded alongside Bley, would lead her to her first solo effort - "I'm The One", precisely.

As legendary as it is unjustly forgotten, this debut reveals the three faces of an exceptional musician: the prodigious singer, the eclectic songwriter, and the fearless keyboardist. The result is an extraordinary bouquet of experimental pieces, drawing as much on the classical tradition (chamber lieder) as on learned avant-garde (Stockhausen's "Kontakte"), on the futuristic electronics of Germany's "cosmic couriers" as much as on the spatial fusion of Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock.

Put that way, it might sound like your typical “brick to the head”, good only to satisfy the onanistic itch of some snobbish critic, leaving the listener in Hamlet-like doubt about their own interpretive abilities. Relax, with Annette Peacock it won't be like that. At the end of these trips to unknown planets, you always land back on Earth's crust, right where it all began, where blues, jazz and soul planted their ineradicable roots. Rarely has avant-garde music been presented with such a high degree of accessibility.

There's no point resisting, then: you too will lose your head over this stunner, the moment you catch in her voice the warmth of Nina Simone and the expressive rawness of Janis Joplin, the soft elegance of Joni Mitchell and the inhuman gurgles of soprano Cathy Berberian. A voice, filtered through the moog, capable of enchanting with sweet soul melismas one moment and unsettling with witchy vocalizations the next.

An example of this admirable stylistic schizophrenia is the opening "I'm The One", which explores different registers with disarming ease: it begins as a cosmic fanfare steeped in free-jazz moods, continues into a jazz-funk disturbed by electronic clatter, and finally fades into a desperate soul ballad. The other manifesto-track is "One Way", in which a carpet of alien polyrhythms serves as intro to a majestic R&B poem, declaimed by the goddess Annette over moving interplays of guitar, organ and sax. The goddess then turns into a hag in the graveyard honky-tonk of "Blood", before transforming once again into a wandering soul in search of love on the sublime cover of "Love Me Tender".

In many tracks the skill of the backing band – featuring Tom Cosgrove's guitar, Rick Morotta's drums and Michael Moss's tenor sax – proves decisive, but even when left alone at the piano, Annette displays an unmatched class, as on the wonderful torch song "7 Days".

Love's pangs are soothed only by the libidinous explosion of "Pony", where a scorching groove climbs alongside licentious moans, while all around is a funk-fuelled embrace, with the guitars ejaculating litres of wah-wah. The final ride toward infinity is "Gesture Without Plot": first the infinity of space, amid electromagnetic murmurs and liquid touches of vibraphone, then the infinity of the human soul, into which Annette ventures accompanied only by a few piano chords.

There would be much more to tell about Annette Peacock, about the rest of her career, which would see her share the stage with Captain Beefheart and the recording studio with Bill Bruford, yield to the flattery of Salvador Dalí, who wanted her for his holograms, yet resist that of David Bowie, who never managed to secure a collaboration with her. These are sporadic testimonies of a wide-ranging appreciation that made Annette Peacock a legendary figure and this debut one of the most elusive cult records around.

Recently reissued by Future Days Recordings, "I'm The One" is a record that no music lover can ignore. One that you simply cannot help but love.

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02/09/2012