Annette Peacock - I at least assume that she's relatively unknown, which is a shock given her resume.
Melody Maker wrote about her, "Individual are the land mark of Peacock's biography that it seems almost unfair that they should belong to one person; as if her life has been gluttonous for the incidents and acts of legend." Among her admirers are/were: David Bowie, Brian Eno, Lou Reed, and Patti Smith. In addition to her musical accomplishments described below, she was an acolyte of Timothy Leary's and was a holographic actress in a broadway show with Salvador Dali.
Her mother was a concert chellist with the LA Philharmonic, and she was brought up on chamber music. She began composing by the time she was five. When she was in her late teens she moved to NY and became a vocalist in avant garde saxophonist Albert Ayler's band, with whom she toured Europe in the 1960s. She soon began to write in an idiom she calls the "free-form song," which emphasizes the use of space in contrast to the busy, cacophonous tendencies of free jazz. During this period she met and married her first husband, the double bass virtuoso Gary Peacock. She also began to write material specifically for the avant-garde pianist Paul Bley and his trio. Paul Bley's 1967 recording Ballads used Annette Peacock's tunes exclusively. For decades, Bley has remained one of her most devoted interpreters.
Touring as the Annette And Paul Bley Synthesizer Show at the start of the 70s, they used what was then state-of-the-art hardware: machines the size of a Welsh Dresser, with wiring like a telephone exchange, which took 10 minutes to "tune' and programme between numbers. Moogs were then intended only for studio use. Certainly, on the road, the results were primitive and rough by today's standards, but this was real pioneering work.
Peacock used the technology in her own solo, more rock-inclined, work to process her voice or, often, used her voice to generate electronic sounds through the synthesizer, as on 1972's "I'm The One," credited as the first electronic torch LP by NME wirter Chris Bohn. When David Bowie heard it, he asked her to record (on what would have been the Alladin Sane Album) and tour with him (she told him to learn the synthesizer himself). So pioneering was her work in this field that several years later an electronics expert tried to tell her that the processes she was using were impossible given the technology of the time.
She collaborated with King Crimson drummer Bill Bruford on his solo album, "Feels Good to Me", singing vocals on half of the album and in NME's words, "[stole] the whole cake." In the late 1970's she signed to Aural and released a pair of albums "X Dreams" and "The Perfect Release" recorded with a variety of musicians from rock and free jazz including Bill Bruford, Mick Ronson, Chris Spedding that are generally considered to be her finest work. Record Mirror wrote about X-Dreams, "Thoroughly extraordinary...a singer who's Peggy Lee one moment and Nico the next."
Here's an excerpt from AMG's review of X-Dreams:
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Peacock does nothing but sing and recite her wild poetry. Never have jazz dynamics come together and embraced rock's worship of the almighty riff so seamlessly, beginning with the opener, "Mama Never Taught Me How to Cook," with its brazen approach to revealing childhood incest and liberation not only in spite of it, but because of it! Guitars and keyboards dust the floor with one another as Peacock tells a tale of defiance, and an optimism that is taken not given. And yes, despite the subject matter, it is an erotic, tense mess of a song, glorious in its freewheeling temperament and unapologetic confession. In the 11-minute "Real & Defined Androgenes," Peacock's sexual politics ask more questions than they reveal about her thought process. Inside those questions, she lets saxophones and keyboards bleat and skronk their way through her sultry delivery on all the topics addressed by such sexual philosophers before her as the Marquis de Sade, Georges Bataille, Laure, and Pauline Reage. As if to balance out her growing testament on relationships, she adds two wonderful tracks from love's sadder side coming straight out of the blues. The first is "Dear Bela," truly a letter written with the intention of a one-sided conversation. A choir of saxes carries the vocal right into the listener's body so she too can feel the hurt. The other is perhaps the most amazing cover ever of the old Otis Blackwell/Elvis Presley classic, "Don't Be Cruel." Funky, chunky, and lean, this bed of electric pianos and guitars gives Peacock a soft place to fall for taking so many chances with not only her vocal but the blues form itself. She turns the melody back on itself and in turn this bluesy rockabilly number becomes a gorgeously bluesed-out jazz number. Spedding's guitar playing here is nothing less than stunning in both its understatement and the inventive manner in which he keeps the track rooted to its traditional setting while playing Peacock's new arrangement. One is truly contained within the other. There are no weak moments on X-Dreams, and despite its age, the album still sounds a bit ahead of its time. Peacock may have been wringing her own personal exorcism from these tracks, but for the rest of us, she offered a guidebook of complex emotional terrain, a treatise on the messy state of love, and a musical dissertation on how to integrate the nuances of form in rock and jazz.
Here's what they say about "The Perfect Release":
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In typical Peacock fashion, brash arrogance dictated the album's title, The Perfect Release. To be fair, although wildly ahead of its time, it nearly was perfect. Utilizing the talents of one band (the group she met when singing backing vocals on some Linda Lewis sessions) rather than a hearty gang of 20 studio musicians as she had on X-Dreams, Peacock constructed an album of seven extended tracks that were too rock- and pop-oriented for jazz radio programmers to handle and a rock and pop album that was farther to the left than Steely Dan's attempt at appropriating jazz — this was jazz. Needless to report: the album was a commercial flop, and is only being properly discovered here in the digital age. The Perfect Release stitches together the lounge jazz of Lower Manhattan, the Brazilian pop of Tom Jobim, Nara Leao, and Caetano Veloso, the slippery funk of War, and the shifty rock skullduggery of Joni Mitchell's LA studio period. The opener "Lover's Out to Lunch" has steel drums crosscutting the guitars as the synths shape the hallway Peacock has to sing into. When she gushes, "What's happening/Nobody gets it on/Anymore?" and "Love is on the doorstep/Of feeling," all the pop stylings are slashed to ribbons. The melody is catchy and smooth and her singing as soft and sweet as it is carries razor blades for lyrics. The track "Rubber Hunger" has Peacock singing like Astrud Gilberto, in a breathy, lilting wisp. The lyrics drip from her mouth like running water as the band provides the room for her flow, creating a gorgeous groove in the center of the major and diminished sevenths. As a closer, there's the beat poetry dissertation on the state of love in the world in "Survival." Robert Ahwai's guitar trades eights with Max Middleton's amalgam of keyboards underscoring Peacock's Zen poem. It's a rap from the here and now about the here and now; history is relegated to invisibility. Basslines slip under the drums and Peacock slides under them both. It's sexy, relaxed, and loopy; 14 minutes of sensual riffing and rapping that come off as loose as an unbuttoned blouse. In all, if the record's not a masterpiece it is something close. The Perfect Release may not have given Peacock the commercial success she longed for at the time, but it is a record that stands the test of time very well, and is one she is able to be proud of as an artist to this day.
"My Mama Never Taught Me How To Cook"
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contains "X-Dreams" & "The Perfect Release" in their entirity along with bonus tracks, and is the album to get as an introduction.
