The great Terry Sullivan, most famous for his drumming with RENAISSANCE died yesterday after a short illness – an immense loss for everyone who knew him. Terry wasn’t a mere drummer – he played an acoustic guitar, too, and he co-wrote the wondrous “Forever Changing” for the ensemble – Sullivan has a huge, warm presence on the scene and beyond.
No strangers to creating sonic triptychs – there was the “Radio Gnome Invisible” hattrick started with “Flying Teapot” and continued with “Angel’s Egg” and “You” back in the ’70s – GONG have been on another conceptual curve in recent years, and now the ensemble are ready to bring their latest tripartite suite to a close. What began in 2019 with “The Universe Also Collapses” and carried forward by “Unending Ascending” in 2023 is going to be wrapped up on March 13th, when “Bright Spirit” will see the light of day.
Listing all musicians Prairie Prince worked with is nigh on impossible but mentioning just a few of those in whose company he played over the last five decades – people like Nicky Hopkins, George Harrison and Mick Taylor, to mention just a single session of many the American drummer took part in – may give a measure of his talents. Listing bands Prince was in is an easier task, yet these ensembles – first of all THE TUBES, and then JOURNEY and JEFFERSON STARSHIP – are heavyweights, too. He also created visual arts, including stage sets for Olympics and for Michael Jackson and Billy Joel. What the veteran’s resumé doesn’t have is Prairie’s solo album – and this omission will be remedied on March 13th.
The usual salient points of Keith Christmas‘s career – playing acoustic guitar on the “Space Oddity” album and gracing the stage of the inaugural Glastonbury Festival in 1970 – doesn’t do justice to this artist’s talents that shone ever so brightly on his mid-'70s records. What creates a huge gap in the veteran’s discography, though, is the scarcity of concert albums, as there was only one, “Live At The Pump” from 2012, and that’s something which has just been remedied, to an extent.
Somewhere between chords and notes, every person who wants to start playing guitar seems captivated by its sound and the way this instrument is played. At first, almost every person is clueless and not aware that this kind of process takes a lot of time, patience, and consistency. It may seem very easy and not as challenging, but in reality, learning to play this amazing instrument can sometimes be very demanding.
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