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The Dale Jacobs Group
Live at Puccini's
Singwell - 1976
Michael Panontin
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Live at Puccini's looks like the sort of disc one could easily pass over while digging through the crates, its cheesy cover suggesting the worst of 1970s dinner jazz. But it's actually quite sought after, and prices of late have been creeping up, most likely for the appearance of electronics pioneer Ralph Dyck.
Dyck, who passed away in 2003 at the relatively young age of 71, once supplied the radio theme for Radio-Canada's coverage of the 1976 Montreal Olympics. But the Winnipeg-born musician, composer and engineer was also an electronics tinkerer. His home-designed sequencer, which he originally conceived in the early seventies while on tour with Paul Horn, would eventually serve as the prototype for the Roland MC-8, popularized by groups like Tangerine Dream and Yellow Magic Orchestra.
"I knew absolutely nothing about computers, I was an untrained, fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants amateur," Dyck recalled for a blog named after the instrument. "However, I knew how to pick my friends and I had a couple that helped me immensely."
One of those friends was composer Theo Goldberg, who helped Dyck secure a $4000 Canada Council for the Arts grant. He immediately set to work building his first sequencer, function by function using TTL (transistor-transistor logic) and shift registers for memory. He unveiled it the following year in 1973, when he was asked to record the theme for a BCTV news program. Eventually, that novel creation caught the attention of Roland's head honcho Ikutaro Kakehashi, who came to Dyck's studio to hear it and "said it was perfect".
Roland and Dyck struck a deal, and the Canadian was flown in to help the company develop something better. "I went to Japan and helped in the musical debugging and wrote and programmed some demo pieces. The MC-8 was based on my method but was much, much more powerful. They had proper engineers to do this, not just piano players."
On Live at Puccini's, Dyck was invited to join the Dale Jacobs Group on stage at the once-popular Italian restaurant on Vancouver's Main Street. Together, he and Jacobs teamed up to form an impressive duo, together boasting in their arsenal an electric piano, a Roland EP-30, SH-2000 and SH-5, a Roland string ensemble and a synthesizer with a space echo. The result is a weird melding of jazz and spacy electronics ranging from full-on electro freakfests to lithe tunes that edge their way towards spiritual jazz.
The album opens with Dyck's 'Discovery', a frenetic, if at times over-the-top, workout of soprano sax and synthesizers that weave their way around a super-funky rhythm section supplied by electric bassist Brian Harrison. 'Visions of Rio' follows that and is an appropriate comedown after such a full-on assault, its languid Latin-tinged rhythms allowing guest saxophonist Wayne Kozak plenty of room to showcase his skills.
But for all the electronic gimmickry, there are still plenty of trad elements on Live at Puccini's. Jacobs displays some deft piano soloing on 'Splash', while the excellent 'What Else', the opener on side 2 and easily the record's best track, is at its high points a sublime statement of 70s jazz. It opens with Dyck coaxing sounds from his sequencer and almost feels like one of those experimental moog records from the previous decade. That is until it relaxes into a fetching bit of radio jazz, where pretty well the whole group come together beautifully, especially the freewheeling interplay of sax, electric piano and bass.
Jacobs would make his proper debut a couple of years later with the slicker-sounding Cobra, which was released on Epic in a number of countries including the US, UK, Italy, Australia and Japan. Though not nearly as coveted as Live at Puccini's, it did manage a brief write-up in issue #21 of Wax Poetics, in which the esteemed magazine referred to it as "an instrumental Steely Dan record on synthesized steroids".
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