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Soft Machine - Esther's Nose Job
May we begin? We May, with the birthday of a recently deceased Jazz-Rock icon, responsible for some of the most beloved music of our era.
Married to the same woman since 1967, the band he founded a year prior remains one of the genre's most revered and imitated, and today's birthday guy is one of the central whys.
One of the first groups to really achieve a viable, integrated synthesis of Jazz and Rock idioms, their output from 1967-1976 stands alongside any.
Their keyboard player, born this day in 1943, did as much as anyone of the very distinguished players who came through The Soft Machine to determine both the vision of their musical vocabulary and the intensity of their legendary live performances.
As time went on, his influence in the band he helped start waned and he decided to leave in 1976, going on to a solo career with a heavy emphasis in soundtrack and library music.
But it's for his work in the guidance and operation of The Soft Machine that Mike Ratledge will always be most remembered, with his distorted, twisting organ solos and knotty, memorably serpentine compositions leaving a most lasting impression on all subsequent musos. Anyone seeking to merge the insistent energies of Rock with the more harmonically sophisticated writing and improvisation of Jazz will drive on roads he helped pave.
There are a million Soft Machine ROIOs and a whole lot of them have seen official release, with this band being one of the most well-documented of the Golden 1960s/1970s Era, before Autotune smoothed folks' musical noodles.
Rather than yack up some shoddy bootleg that will get processed and officially released someday anyway, I spent the last month or so -- breaking in the middle when my brother died and I had to go to the east coast -- plotting a sort of fantasia concert, where all of Mike Ratledge's Soft Machine songs, curated from all the many live CDs that have come out over the decades, might get strung together to form one, long experience focused on the birthday boy.
I wanted to do it in the spirit and style of a classic concert joint of these guys -- where one song seamlessly dissolves into the next in a continuous, extended medley-type performance -- but trying to join tracks from different shows and lineups to sound like one thing and not a Picassofied Frankenstein job was a daunting, seemingly impossible effort I wasn't sure I could pull off with any efficacy.
Much to my surprise, once I started the process and investigated what could happen, I got into a momentum with it and came up with 2 1/2 hours of something well worth hearing, if I do say so.
Of course it'll never be perfect given that it's assembled from over a dozen different sets, but here in Blisstown we never let the perfect be the enemy of the awesome en route to our goal of Cool Live Music Stuff That Doesn't Really Exist In This Form Yet.
That said, let's wish a happy 82nd birthday to Mike Ratledge with a celebration of his most tremendous tunes, all stacked together like a house of keys and propulsively performed by several Soft Machines.
The Man Who Waved At Trains
The Soft Machine plays the music of Mike Ratledge
In concert, 1970-1975
01 Out-Bloody-Rageous
02 Esther's Nose Job/Pigling Bland
03 Teeth/Pigling Bland (reprise)
04 Eamonn Andrews
05 37 1/2
06 Slightly All the Time
07 Drop
08 The Man Who Waved At Trains
09 Peff
10 All White
11 As If
12 Chloe and the Pirates
13 Gesolreut
14 Stanley Stamp's Gibbon Album
15 Backwards
16 Esther's Nose Job
17 Slightly All the Time/Eamonn Andrews
Total time: 2:33:49
disc break goes after Track 07
compendium of the compositions of Mike Ratledge, as performed by The Soft Machine between 1970-1975
assembled from multivarious official live releases, edited, sequenced and remastered by EN, April/May 2025
951 MB FLAC/direct link
951 MB FLAC/direct link
Mike Ratledge died in February, living into his eighties. His music is gonna outlive everybody currently alive, and probably a whole lot of unborn and as-yet-unconceived babies hurtling, unsuspecting of all that awaits, down the birthpike in the future.
I worked extra hard to make this little tribute a thing, and I ended up putting it in my old Note phone -- my go-to music player of choice -- which, often than not, means it must be at least a quarter halfway decent.
I shall return with something yummy, certain to put a good Hurting on you all, in a few days. But don't hesitate to celebrate the potentate of The Soft Machine with us, with this Out-Bloody-Rageous tape in homage to the late, great Mike Ratledge!--J.
5.6.1943 - 2.5.2025