hypersongs

Nucleus

A British jazz-rock band founded in 1969 by the trumpeter Ian Carr, whose first album Elastic Rock (1970) won them first prize at the Montreux Jazz Festival and is counted among the first British fusion records.

Ian Carr's band

Nucleus was founded in 1969 by the trumpeter and composer Ian Carr, born in Dumfries, Scotland, who had led the Rendell-Carr Quintet in the mid and late 1960s. The first line-up was Carr on trumpet and flugelhorn, Karl Jenkins on oboe, baritone saxophone and keyboards, Brian Smith on saxophones and flute, Chris Spedding on guitar, Jeff Clyne on bass and John Marshall on drums. Over twenty years many players passed through, among them the trumpeters Kenny Wheeler and Harry Beckett, the keyboardists Gordon Beck and John Taylor, the guitar players Allan Holdsworth and Ray Russell, and the singer Norma Winstone.

Elastic Rock (Vertigo, March 1970) was recorded on January 12 to 21 at Trident Studios in London, produced by Peter King, and reached number 46 in the UK. In July 1970 the band took first prize at the Montreux Jazz Festival, playing music from the album, and then played the Newport Jazz Festival and the Village Gate in New York; a Montreux set with the singer Leon Thomas was issued later as Live 1970. Carr was probably inspired by Miles Davis's turn to electric music in 1969, though Bitches Brew was not yet out and, by Carr's account, the band had not heard In a Silent Way.

The Vertigo years and after

Vertigo issued We'll Talk About It Later (1970), Solar Plexus (1971), Belladonna (1972), Labyrinth (1973), Roots (1973), Under the Sun (1974), Snakehips Etcetera (1975) and Alleycat (1975); later records include In Flagranti Delicto (Contemp, 1977), Out of the Long Dark (Capitol, 1979) and Awakening (Mood, 1980). Colin Larkin called the first three albums vital in any comprehensive rock or jazz collection, while Jazzwise's Andy Robson treats We'll Talk About It Later through Labyrinth as the core and the later Vertigo albums as clearly weaker. Esoteric collected the Vertigo albums in Torrid Zone: The Vertigo Recordings 1970-1975 (2019), and Repertoire issued a 13-disc Live at the BBC box in 2021.

The band ended in 1989, with one-off reunions in 2005, 2007 and 2009, the last as Nucleus Revisited at Ronnie Scott's on August 4, 2009. Carr died on February 25, 2009, aged 75. He wrote Miles Davis: The Definitive Biography (1999) and a Keith Jarrett biography (1991), Alyn Shipton wrote his biography in 2006, and Roger Farbey's Elastic Dream: The Music of Ian Carr is an annotated discography.

Albums

  • Elastic Rock 1970 · Vertigo

    Their first album: thirteen short pieces and a nine-minute "Torrid Zone", mostly by Karl Jenkins, recorded in nine days in January 1970.

Songs

  • Elastic Rock Elastic Rock · 1970

    The title track of the band's first album, written by Karl Jenkins.

  • Torrid Zone Elastic Rock · 1970

    The longest piece on Elastic Rock, a laidback funk groove that leads into "Stonescape" and later gave its name to the 2019 Vertigo box set.

Sources

  1. Nucleus (band), Wikipedia
  2. Ian Carr, Wikipedia
  3. Elastic Rock, Wikipedia
  4. Elastic Dream: the music of Ian Carr, Jazz Journal (2023-06-25)