The Man

Throughout the 1990s, Cuneiform Records has released essential Happy the Man material that had been overlooked by the band's label Arista in the mid-'70s. Death's Crown presents three archival recordings made in 1974 and 1976 in Happy the Man's rehearsal room. The sound quality is rather poor (the voice is particularly lost in the background), but it is still enjoyable and the beauty of the music makes up for the inconvenience. The record opens with the title track, "Death's Crown," an 11-part suite of 38 minutes. Composed in 1974, "Death's Crown" was originally a multimedia performance including dancers, actors, and a light and slide show. The piece has been performed on numerous occasions, and the band later integrated some parts into its live show (as an example, part five appears on the Live CD as the track "Open Book"). It is the tale of a man's journey into the other side of life, sung in the most emotional way by Frank Wyatt…

One quiet night, as his friends gather to share their goodbyes to him, John offers up a delicious conundrum: let’s say a man - a caveman, really - managed to survive for 14,000 years, never dying. What would he be like today? John’s friends, professors and academics from a nearby college, enjoy the puzzle and the countless questions it creates. What about his biology would help him live so long? How far back could his memories go before they cloud up? How much knowledge could such a man gather over thousands of lifetimes? How many relationships must he deny himself in order to keep his past a secret?

This recording is the trunk of the tree jazz rock grew from(the "non-fusion" jazzrock). Al Kooper's vision was "right on it", as he had the notion to utilize horns in rockmusics with a "big band" concept in mind, wonderful expansive chords voiced by the section, not just the usual R&B riffing that was the state of things in pop musics until then.