MoonJune 2025
Postcards From The Past
Lyrically on the beat: Leeds polymath leads the listener down memory lane to his innermost instrumental secrets.
It’s difficult to scope contemporary fusion landscape without locating Gary Husband in it – both as part of various ensembles and as an artist in his own right, one who’s equally adept at dealing with skins and keys and who’s been steadfastly refusing to draw any sort of percussive or melodic line between drums and piano. Unsurprisingly, in the decades that passed since the appearance of his 1998 solo debut "The Diary Of A Plastic Box" Husband’s not only released a stunning amount of material, but also amassed a host of pieces which remained in his vaults. And now, spanning the period between times preceding Gary’s first outing with Allan Holdsworth, when a wide audience became aware of his talents, and recent years, some of the tracks which fell through the cracks are finally brought to the light.
A few of the more than a score numbers on offer may sound familiar to the Englishman’s followers, although they’re presented in a different form here, as a 1979 far-reaching demo of “The Things You See (When You Haven’t Got Your Gun)” 0 which would end up on Holdsworth’s “I.O.U.” – shares space with delicate sketches for Husband and Alex Machacek’s “Now” from 2013. Still, most of the “Postcards” are cuts that have never been heard before, at least in studio variants. There are wonders aplenty from the intimately familial 1982’s “Song For My Father” which features old pal Paul Williams’s vocals, and 1986’s folk-influenced “Song For My Mother” which showcases Gary’s own mastery of acoustic guitar, to the excitingly contemporary cover of his friend Chick Corea’s “500 Miles High” from 2021, and to 2016’s “Reykjavik Dream” which opens this expansive two-disc collection in a gently audacious new-age-to-symphony-to-techno manner. Yet while stylistic diversity and performative versatility feel integral to the veteran’s oeuvre, and the listeners come to expect nothing less of him, Husband’s ability to create a single – singular! – organic context out of tunes from a broad temporal spectrum can’t stop to astound.
Always challenging himself – as eloquently suggested by an exquisitely tentative design and then rough mix of “City Nights 2013” in which Gary reimagines Vinnie Colaiuta’s part from Allan’s “Secrets” where the Brit handled only ivories on the piece he wrote – and finding fresh ways to express every emotional nuance as a sonic detail, Husband’s moving from mood to mood with rare elegance. And if the exuberant “The Disguise” – laid down in 2016 with Graeme Blevins on sax and Sam Burgess on bass – and 2009’s “Deux Deux’s Blues” from the Ronnie Scott’s stage seem very much trad-jazz-minded, 2014’s melancholic improv “Not Even The Rain” enters the realm of abstract, albeit beautiful, experiments, as Steve Topping and Michael Mondesir’s respective six and four strings weave in and out of the leader’s claviature and cymbals. Of course, the live likes of 2024’s epic “Evocations of Burt Bacharach” with Randy Brecker, Jerry Goodman and other stars and of insistently breezy “Water On The Brain” – preserved for posterity in 1979 or 1980 with the “I.O.U.” ensemble – will get scrutinized quite attentively, taking the focus away from the drummer, but the imaginatively groovy, and unhurried, “Fallow Land” and “The Train” which he had projected with Topping and Paul Carmichael earlier emphasize the supreme skills and songsmith maturity of the then-18-year-old Gary.
It’s that young dreamer who grew up into a master behind such fantasy-stirring instrumentals as the fairly recent “A Filmic Rhapsody” or “Ternities & Bandons” and who remained high-spirited enough to jive on the funky “The Fashion Police” and bang on the incidental “Aphorism” with total abandon. It’s that lover of reverie whose past, present and future form a continuum worthy of further exploration. More “Postcards” like these, please!
*****
