Flipping through a stack of records I’d pulled from my crates as possible Records at Random candidates I noticed what appeared to be a Swedish name on the back cover of one of the LPs. Considering the subject of yesterday’s Blogarhythm I thought I’d hit blog-segue paydirt! But upon closer inspection I found the name, Bengt Böckmann, belonged to the artist responsible for designing the album cover, not creating any of the music on the actual album. Drat! Foiled again!
The list of contributing musicians, and the photo of them on the rear cover, would seem to indicate that the band was something of a multi-national affair. That band, a progressive Jazz outfit with an ever-changing line-up called Passport, was in fact the pet-project of one Klaus Doldinger, a German-born multi-instrumentalist (here responsible for saxophone, flute and keyboards) and was based for most of it’s existence, like Doldinger himself, in Germany. Both Doldinger and Passport enjoyed success in Germany, and he was even tapped to score notable films such as Das Boot and The Neverending Story, although his score for the latter was embellished by additional music from Giorgio Moroder for the film’s stateside release.
The music Doldinger and his collaborators in Passport concocted for their 1978 LP Sky Blue actually possess the sort of dream-like qualities that would befit a children’s fantasy film, and it betrays Doldinger as a man just as enamored of synthesizers as Giorgio Moroder. A composite of Prog-Rock, Psyche-Rock, so-called Krautrock, early Electronica, improvisational Jazz, and the homogenized Jazz-Funk that provided the prototype for what would one day be called Lite-Jazz, Passport’s output on Sky Blue is not at all dissimilar to the Jazz-Fusion of the similarly-structured American experimental Jazz collective Weather Report.
At numerous times throughout the album the music’s coldly robotic, upliftingly fantastic, and funky-but-restrained character reminded me of Hip-Hop producer El-P’s work on Cannibal Ox’s The Cold Vein. So artists sampled on that album — such as the aforementioned Moroder, Philly-Soul synth-aficionado Dexter Wansel, electronic Art-Rocker and performance-artist Laurie Anderson, and former Weather Report bassist Jaco Pastorius — would provide fair points of reference in their unique ways too.
The two-part suite which opens the album, titled “Ataraxia,” is sci-fi-soundtrack-ready, with layers of synthesizers providing the bulk of instrumentation aside from Doldinger’s sax, and the steady, head-bob-inducing drums of Willy Ketzer making it sound like blaxploitation music for robots. The title track goes for an uptempo, elemental Funk groove a-la Earth Wind & Fire, with tribal percussion, guitar and live bass filling out a more organic take on the band’s sound. While “Reng Ding Dang Dong” closes out side one with a return to the “Ataraxia” formula (a wall of synths battered by minimal-but-hard drums) sounding like a freakily psychedelic Bruce Haack tune in the process.
Save for “Loco-Motive,” a slick Disco-influenced track that turns the group’s array of synths into a veritable orchestra and wouldn’t sound out of place sandwiched between Club Classics, the b-side rarely gets a spin from me. Most of the remaining tunes just get a little too close to ’80s movie soundtrack schmaltz and elevator muzak Lite-Jazz for my tastes.
-El Keter