Chapman

Roger Chapman is best known for his barbed-wire voice, used to front British '70s rock acts Family and Streetwalkers. He began a long-awaited solo career in 1978 that led to over a dozen full-length releases. Never heard of them? It's not surprising: album-wise, he camped out in Germany for 20 years. His first album and tour got high praise in his British homeland, but critics cut into him soon after. When the hassle-free German market beckoned, Chapman began to focus his subsequent work there, where he had become a musical hero, "the working-class artist." Chapman split with his longtime writing partner, Charlie Whitney, after the breakup of Streetwalkers in 1977.

This music, the album EB=MC2 and Chapman and Banai’s concerts together before that can ultimately be traced back to two valleys. One near Hawnby, North Yorkshire, lush green and full of trees, the other, more austere, in northern Galilee. Michael Chapman, paying his way through Art College in the early ’60s worked as a woodsman on the North Yorkshire Mexborough estate in the summer breaks and found inspiration for classics like “In the Valley” and “Among the Trees,” leaning against the trees with his guitar. Slightly later, Ehud Banai spent an extended reflective period in the ’70s, alone near Rosh Pina in Galilee, with his guitar, a ghetto blaster and one cassette. On that inspirational cassette was Michel Chapman’s 1969 Fully Qualified Survivor album. Travel forward over 30 years to 2012, and Ehud, now a successful musician with a string of his own albums, is playing The 12 Bar Club on Denmark Street in London.

A studio album by Roger Chapman is always an event. Since '66, when the British singer-songwriter emerged as the voice of his generation with the seminal Family band, through every twist of his four-decade solo career, Chappo's output has defied music industry protocol, challenged genre, and held up a mirror to the times. "I've never stopped writing," he reflects, "and with Life In The Pond, I felt the need to hear what I'd put down in music."

Renowned in his day as a virtuoso keyboard player, Bernardo Pasquini (1637-1710) was the most important Italian composer of keyboard music between Frescobaldi and Domenico Scarlatti. In that capacity his output has output has been surveyed by Brilliant Classics with authoritative collections of his sonatas for harpsichord (94286) and for two organs (94347). However, Pasquini also composed more than 70 cantatas – most of them for one and two voices with continuo accompaniment, of the concise and dramatic kind written by the young Handel after he arrived in Rome in 1706.

While Michael Chapman has often worked with other musicians on his recordings over the course of his lengthy career, on his 2008 release Time Past Time Passing, only his guitar and voice are heard…

BGO's two-fer reissue of Michael Chapman's most mysterious recording, Window from 1970, and its sequel, Wrecked Again, are two welcome reissues in the British singer/songwriter's CD catalog. Window is the great anomaly in Chapman's erratic, maverick career. The album was due to be recorded as a quick follow-up to the sensation that his debut, Fully Qualified Survivor, created on the British media scene. According to Marc Higgins' fine liner notes to this package, Chapman was supposed to record between touring dates. After a first demo and track session, Chapman went on tour, returning only to find that EMI had rushed 20,000 copies of the demo to print! Chapman himself warned fans off the record, telling them specifically not to buy it, but has performed songs from it in his live show continually for the last 30-plus years. The material is strong, and at this late date, nearly three and half decades after the fact, it sounds fresh. Immediacy, warmth, and the excitement of "first thought, best thought" are all over the set.

In 1969 British singer/songwriter Michael Chapman took the U.K.'s folk-rock world by surprise with his debut album, Rainmaker, on the Harvest label. In an era when each week garnered a new surprise in the music world, gathering serious and widespread critical acclaim wasn't easy, and finding a buying public near impossible. Rainmaker showcases a new talent who holds nothing back for himself. Every songwriting principle and trick, killer guitar riff, and songwriting hook in his bag makes an appearance here (something he would never do again). As a result, there are several truly striking things about the album that makes it stand out from the rest of the Brit folk-rock slog from the late '60s. One of them is Chapman's guitar playing.

This is a recording of a concert at Barrell's Ale House, Berwick-upon-Tweed, 15th August 2003. Michael Chapman playing acoustic in a atmospheric location in a club in front of a wall of blue note jazz posters. The gig features many of Michael Chapmans best loved songs including 'Shuffleboat River Farewell', 'One Time Thing' and 'Kodak Ghosts'. Michael Chapman is an English singer-songwriter and guitarist. Chapman originally began playing guitar with jazz bands, mainly in his home town of Leeds in The West Riding of Yorkshire. He became well known in the folk clubs of the late 1960s, as well as on the 'progressive' music scene, and has recorded over 40 albums to date. In 2016 Chapman celebrated 50 years as a professional musician. He still plays professionally and regularly tours in the UK, Europe and US.

Even in Michael Chapman’s vast and wildly diverse catalog of releases, Playing Guitar the Easy Way is an outlier. Issued in 1978 during his association with Criminal Records, this is the innovative and storied guitarist’s instructional album. Like all things Chapman, this one has a twist or two. For starters, it can be listened to on its own. The music is played on acoustic six- and twelve-string guitars—there is even an electric piece in “English Musick”— that come off as standalone originals and/or original derivations on folk standards. This is also one of (if not the) very first guitar instruction recordings—with an accompanying booklet of tablature—to showcase the use of different tunings such as the now ubiquitous DADGAD.