Muffins

• A History of Rock Music
• Links to other sites

The main American followers of Soft Machine were the Muffins. Active in Washington between 1973 and 1984, they led a miserable and solitary existence, ignored by much of the musical establishment of the time. The “prog-rock” of the 1990s, however, recognized them as precursors and founding fathers. In recent years their well-deserved posthumous fame has been celebrated with a series of previously unreleased recordings, collected by Cuneiform on the cassettes Secret Signals II (material from 1974/75) and The Round Window (credited to Newhouse), and on the CD Chronometers.

The latter is the most interesting, as it documents recordings from the period between the summers of 1975 and 1976, when the lineup was a quintet with Dave Newhouse (keyboards), the main composer, Tom Scott (winds), Billy Swann (bass), Stuart Abramowitz (percussion), and Mike Zentner (guitar). The title suite is the first of their masterpieces, a wild twenty-two-minute gallop through a vast musical territory. The influence of minimalism and jazz-rock is still strong, but already unmistakable are the clownish flair of their collage, the variety of instrumentation, and the slapstick rhythm of the “editing.”
While many passages still feel like exploratory sketches, others (such as the finale) already deserve a place in the annals of the absurd. Jazz-rock (Come What Molten Card, Bush, Crezner OK, Blind Cave Tetra), bebop (Please Do Not Open Mr Fischer), music-hall (the march of The Manilla Robots), orchestral and Zappa-esque absurd themes (Joe Crop On A Toxic Planet, the blues/waltz of You Eat Them Pears) are the main ingredients.

For Manna/Mirage (RandomRadar, 1978), their first official album, the lineup had been reduced to a quartet, with Paul Sears on percussion and without Zentner. This is their masterpiece, and one of the masterpieces of the era. The first two tracks are simply another display of their eclecticism: the minimalist fanfare of Monkey With The Golden Eyes manages to construct ceremonial music with oriental overtones, while Hobart Got Burned opens with free jazz that then coalesces into a colorful, rhythmic, and melodic jazz-rock theme in the style of Colosseum.
The first side ends with Amelia Earhart, another of their peaks. Its main theme is an irreverent fanfare (played initially by keyboards and then doubled by saxophone and bass clarinet), which is immediately dispersed into a maelstrom of collective improvisations, cacophonous wind outbursts, exhausting percussion work, dreamy flute solos, obsessive minimalism, absurd quadrilles for saxophone, bass-led round dances, and finally a near–new age trance with the flute unfolding long, ecstatic phrases. It is avant-garde jazz situated halfway between the sweeping “total” suites of Zappa and the surreal pastiches of Lol Coxhill. All the musicians prove to be outstanding instrumentalists, but Scott in particular juggles dozens of wind instruments with the ease of an entire chamber orchestra.
Even more eclectic, unrestrained, and brilliant is the suite on the second side, The Adventures Of Captain Boomerang, one of the great masterpieces of progressive rock, a monumental jam that remains fluid and cohesive despite a barrage of musical gags. The art of humorous collage of early Frank Zappa is here pushed to its extreme consequences: every theme is a harmonic idea, and every idea lasts only a few seconds. From the swinging saxophone theme that serves as overture to the tap-dance of dissonant noises that follows, from various music-hall sketches to countless melodies “wasted” in a few bars of comic arrangement, from minimalist ballets for electronics, percussion, and winds to exuberant jazz-rock flights, this fantasy constantly reinvents itself, feeding each “number” with the debris of the previous ones, shamelessly recycling the same ideas in a chameleonic art of transformation. Folk dances for flute, nursery rhymes for bass clarinet, “drizzles” of organ chords, romantic motifs for baritone sax, squeaks and meows for synthesized sax are packed one after another to form a relentless journey into the heart of music.

Between 1977 and 1980 the group composed the material later released posthumously on Open City (Cuneiform). After Air Fiction, a live album of which only one hundred copies were pressed, and after contributing to Gravity by Fred Frith, the Muffins recorded (in late 1980) 185 (RandomRadar, 1982), released only two years later, and then disbanded.
For 185 the lineup had stabilized with Tom Scott on winds, David Newhouse on keyboards and winds, Billy Swann on guitars and bass, and Paul Sears on percussion, with frequent contributions from Fred Frith. The opening track, Angle Dance, a wind fanfare over polyrhythms of metallic percussion, shows how far the group had moved toward the avant-garde. Very little remains of the spirit of collective improvisation in the face of these rigid geometries, of capricious compositions such as Antidote To Dry-Dock or Horsebones, of “concrete” cacophonies like Dream Beat. The Muffins recover a measure of humanity in the comic, Zappa-like round dances of the long Zoom Resume and Under Dali's Wing. The balance between rationality and surrealism is perhaps achieved in the chaotic and noisy These Castle Children, paced like a pow-wow and shrieked by deranged winds amid a riot of pianistic dissonance. The vocal parts (mostly “Brechtian” choruses) add little to the instrumental scores, which dominate the scene unchallenged.

As the history of the Muffins takes on a more complete shape, the group appears ever more important and essential.

Bandwidth (Cuneiform, 2002), recorded by the Manna/Mirage quartet of Newhouse, Sears, Swann and Scott, is the first studio album by the Muffins in two decades. The times have changed. Gone is the neurosis of the new wave, gone are the avant-rock postures, gone are the angular rhythms. The Muffins plays laid-back jazz-rock with a solid rhythmic underpinning and soulful horns-driven arrangements. World Maps is rescued from falling into the "new age" category by a Shaft-style guitar and, towards the end, by a deliciously frantic theme in the horns. Dear Mona is certainly catchy, but hardly any more daring than most generic soft-jazz on mainstream radio. A few of the tracks are atmospheric and eerie a` la Weather Report (Military Road). People In The Snow features more intricate dialogues among the horns and Out Of The Boot displays some harmonic tension, bordering on the cacophonic; but overall the proceedings are kept within the easy-listening range. Compared with their masterpieces, this is music for nostalgic, retired yuppies.

The real return to form was Double Negative (Cuneiform, 2004). Propelled by the phantasmagoric sounds of Thomas Scott's reeds and Dave Newhouse's keyboards and by one of tock's most reliable rhythm sections, the Muffins deconstruct folk dance (The Highlands), romantic easy-listening (Childhood's End), bebop jazz (Choombachang, one of the standouts), tv soundtrack music of the Sixties (Exquisite Corpse), etc. But these tracks frequently lack a center of mass, enabling cinematic structures that are horribly deformed melodic fantasias (Writing Blind, Angel from Lebanon). The Muffins also display a passion for crafting scherzos of various kinds (The Ugly Buttling, Stethorns Punctum). Newhouse's mini-string symphony They Come on Unknown Nights deserved a more extended treatment instead of turning right away into yet another scherzo. But, far from being a parody, the majestic catchy theme of Frozen Charlotte, is their most serious attempt at pop music since inception. While low on substance, this is their longest album, as well as the most varied and their sleekest production.

Loveletter #2 (2005) documents a live improvisation by the Muffins and saxophonists Marshall Allen and Knoel Scott, of the Sun Ra Arkestra, by far their most abstract and bold recording.

The Muffins (bassist Billy Swann, drummer Paul Sears and multi-instrumentists Dave Newhouse and Thomas Frasier Scott) recorded in 2008 the music that later appeared on Palindrome (Musea, 2010) and Mother Tongue (Hobart, 2012).

Baker’s Dozen (Cuneiform, 2022) is a 13-disc box-set that collects unreleased live and studio recordings from 1975-2010.