"Never pet a burning dog"
~ Steve Gadd, when asked "What advice would you give a young musician trying to break into the music business?"

"Never Pet A Burning Dog" is a delicious blend of lullaby, power ballad, prog rock, jazz fusion, nuevo metal, and free jazz capable of converting the unfaithful to the deeper waters of the Canterbury Scene.  These musicians are intimately familiar with the outer reaches of the zen musical universe where flying fishes play among the stars and dark matter of the Alternate Real.  There's something sparkling and effervescent about this particular space trucking adventure that this could be the Condé Nast tour of the regions where lesser musicians rightly fear to go.

This album satisfies more sides of my musical taste than any three albums, unless you include the Kronos String Quartet.  The part of my head that likes the high of new composition, of the fire of free jazz white hot with talent, or seeks out jam band miracles (without slugging through three-hours of noodling), and that something special in the interaction of three or four great minds lost in the joy of the dialogue having a private moment in a public place.  These guys each have a special world of music between their ears with the confidence and spunk to bring their inner vision out full Monty in public in a display as astonishing as a crack band of choreographed swimmers surfacing in the pond at the local dog park.  I don't know why they bother making music this good, it don't get played on the radio.  Mr. DJ don't think the rabble can listen close enough to git it, but ain't that what they said 'bout Trane, Ornette, Zappa, Treemonisha, Harry Partch, Tom Waits, Charlie Haden and Bela Fleck? 

Okay, so this isn't generally the right album to play at a dinner party.  I've tried it, and it went over well until things get out of hand in the second cut.  This is an album to listen to as deeply and carefully as you choose, headphones on if possible.  The "free" aspect of these songs is a diving board into dialogue between these three/four musicians in search of that "lost chord" or some other alchemical expression of sound to be discovered as a poem buried in the verbiage of musical form.  This music is no mere "experiment" which might be content with an outcome, but a more accessible expression of freedom in search of that new music just a little out of reach but well within the grasp of these musicians.  There is drama in these songs, anticipation and release, and a story well told about the creative prankster of the 21st Century in music.  This album is the single fruit of many trees including John Coltrane's Ascension, that great oak Court of the Crimson King, Zappa, Beefheart, the commonplace complexity of African baliphon, bata, and M'bira, and the lyricism of ballads as unlikely as Jacques Brel or Astrud Gilberto.  These guys play anything they like but the tunes have a pulse and a flow to keep the dialogue interesting even if the sound may seem a little over my head.  These plucky musicians may be poking holes in the canopy of the sky to let the light of heaven in, but that's probably not the medieval metaphor this douBt band would choose.  I find myself rocking to a rhythm implied in the pulse and thinking about floating in space with this album.  They are my Hubble's eye view of a galaxy not visible to the naked folk musician.  Certainty is for suckers.  I'll plot my course with douBt.

"I don't want truth.  I want CERTAINTY!"
~ David Bowie (with tongue in cheek)

Maguire picks lines and chords from the air as unexpected as they are fit.  There's something restless in his keyboard and he's fun to watch on video.  His eyes may be closed as though he is seeing the flow of the music in beams of color and planetary bodies floating in space.  Alex has an explosive sense of time and a sense of humor in his various keyboards.  He often stirs the waters with some departure in the line or variant chord to keep things alert on the set of the sonic movie.  I've seen Cecil Taylor live in an ecstatic and chaotic outdoor performance, and I swear he looked at my astonished face at the end of the concert and laughed with me.  I get the same feeling from videos of Alex Maguire with douBt, though Alex does not play with his elbows.  Alex is for me Till Eulenspiegel ("The Merry Prankster") on keyboards both explosive and lyrical and always joyful in the pursuit of music. 

Michel co-authored with Andrew Morris a comparative account of the musical and cultural acts of two great progressive eccentrics in "Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart and the Secret History of Maximalism" [Just One Book] among several other texts on poetry, music and culture.  [Good Reads]  He is a gentleman, scholar, and a hell of a guitarist and composer.  His other band with Elton Dean (of Soft Machine) is called The Wrong Object which band name can be a dis at the skeptics if you emphasize "The Wrong" as an entity.  Delville's ability to combine differing music styles in a single cohesive tune is remarkable.  His guitar work on NPABD draws from many wells as diverse as jazz, new metal, rock, and sources unknown. 

Tony Bianco's bio on his website and the interview at JazzReview are very personal and revealing.  Tony describes his childhood in the interview:  "My father, being a drummer, put drumsticks in my hands before I could walk,” he recalls. “My father and I used to trade fours and eights while watching TV at night. I was very lucky. It was all unconscious."  Tony has developed an unconventional technique on the drums which may be like a combination of Elvin Jones and Tony Williams.  He's not the usual timekeeper by any means, but the rolling thunder he adds to this band makes him an essential and vital element to this music.  He recalls seeing "Elvin, Mingus, Art Blakey, Woody Shaw, Miles, Liebman, Tony Williams, Dexter Gordon, and Ron Carter" at an early.  His very personal biography reveals:  "There was a time I thought 'forget music' it's impossible. You'll never have your own attitude'. Then I heard John Coltrane. He made me feel it was possible. Praise and Thanks."  His technique is broken down somewhat in a series of extraordinary videos on YouTube of his solo drumming for the song "Avyayah - droning."  He is the first drummer I have heard to bring elements of Elvin Jones into a rock or metal context.  Bianco's unique vision for percussion makes douBt possible in my opinion.  He doesn't pound out the beat in the usual way but the pulse of the music is strong when he plays.  There's some alchemy in that.  Bianco follows the story of the song the way "horizontal" soloing sings along with the larger melody, rather than banging out the signature "vertically" according to the time to the bar on the chart.  "I came up with a project called Freebeat with Elton Dean and sound engineer, Jon Wilkinson. It was a concept of playing through time signatures but playing also free through it." The Freebeat project didn't get it's label-release, but Tony's concept can be heard among these tracks to varying degrees.  I thought long and hard how this process actually works, only to find he had covered it for all to see in in extraordinary bio:

"I think that time signatures are a way of defining phrasing. My music really doesn't watch the time signature as much as the phrasing. Through beats (a drum thing) you can keep a pulse but have no number on the pulse. It's not in 1-1. That's impossible, since the phrasing has to be in one and it's not. It is actually many different time signatures but one pulse."
~ Tony Bianco

Prog Archives calls Richard Sinclair a "pillar of the 'Canterbury Sound.'"  He's an extraordinary bassist with a voice like Chet Baker and a sense of wit as a musician and lyricist. 

He played in the following bands : Wilde Flowers (1964-65), Caravan (1968-72, 1981-82, 1990-92), Delivery (1972), Hatfield and the North (1972-75), Sinclair and the South (1975-76), RSVP (1977), Camel (1977-79), Gowen Miller Sinclair Tomkins (1981), In Cahoots (1982-85), Richard Sinclair Band (1986), Skaboosh! (1988), Going Going (1990), Caravan of Dreams (1991-94), Richard Sinclair/RSVP (1994-96) [Prog Archives]

An opening bell rings from some Steeple in San Luca as Alex begins a cycle of mutating chords in strict time over Richard Sinclair's angelic Chet Baker vocalization.  Richard discovers his bass guitar for a duet with Tony Bianco leading to Laughter without a break.  Tony Bianco rides the cymbals building to a duet with Richard Sinclair on bass the dovetails with Laughter.  The love of melody is a moving experience in this intro to the free to follow. As an intro, this sweet and poignant prayer of a song functions a little like the opener to Eric Claptan's Blues Power with it's laugh line, "Bet you didn't think I knew how to rock 'n' roll." 

Alex's Laughter is built on a jazzy waterfall of descending chords with hints of Woody Woodpecker erupting here and there under Michel Delville's torrent of guitar and Tony Bianco's rolling thunder on drums.  Alex takes an overamped tone on the electric piano reminiscent of early Zappa's Del Preston.  The Corale set a reverent tone, but this Laughter takes a detour from the cathedral of song to a more explosive landscape.  Perhaps that's the element of doubt emerging as a punchline to the sermon above.  This reminds me of the story of the devotee who told his guru he thought he'd found enlightenment, but that there was "dust on the mirror."  The guru brought the boy back to reality with the questions, "What dust?  What mirror?"  Whenever a conversation became sacrosanct, my friend Mike used to shout at me, "What dust?  What mirror?" and we would laugh.  

This song is a vintage Terje Rypdal composition from his 1975 ECM album Odyssey with an enhanced sense of thunder and chaos realized in Michel Delville's arrangement.  The surge and flow of Rypdal's original are strengthened by Bianco's unpredictable kicks and chaos on skins and Delville's flanged and phase shifted lead line.  Maguire's keyboard adds a layer of comping chords and lines leading to a search of a solo.  At times this music seems to describe a storm or sortee over this ancient small town made up of villages with just the one church in Denmark.  [Birkerød Wiki] 

Alex evokes the flow of the sea with a series of notes and accents sounding like the product of a sequencer flowing into a swell of chords over the roll of Tony's drums.  The effect of this song is similar to Debussey's La Mer where an undulating ocean gives rise to events here and there as unpredictable as jumping dolphins off the bow on a cloudy day.  Delville's foggy atmospherics complete the scene.  Alex repeats his frenetic, accented sequencer journey ending in chordal plateaus.  A hint of voices may be issuing a storm warning from the mellotron, but that could be my imagination.  At times Maguire's open ended chords suggest rays of light peaking through the clouds.

As though a resolution of Sea, the douBt band enters a otherworldly Latin land of the jazz ballad with Richard Sinclair doing his best Chet Baker over the sheets of light laid out on mellotron.  This song is a picnic in the middle of the storm.  Tony plays in perfect time keeper while suggesting three in a march time song. 

The title and the tone of the Hammond may be a tip of the hat to Keith Emerson's Brain Salad Surgery.  Alex introduces the song with a repeated swirl of twinkly notes leading to the characteristic Iron Man chords of a nuevo metal power ballad.  The tranquil "chorus" features a simpler Delville playing the melody on an electric so uneffected it might as well be acoustic.  Delville builds into a line built on an oriental scale or modal line similar to Dick Dale's Middle East influenced surf sound.  This is a lyrical example of prog rock which sticks close to the bone like some quieter and early King Crimson when Greg Lake was still with the Crimson King.

Aeon is often spell "eon" and it was used by Homer to describe a lifespan.  Biano's composition flows in the pulse and surges of free time where his rolling thunder tom tom and snare are accented with little starbursts on cymbals.  Delville adds something like a sky saw in spirit over a meandering stream of notes and chords from Alex on keys.  This song takes me to a similar place as a King Crimson live improve from the early days when they played a little more free and could sound like a cloud. 

This song is named for composer and keyboard artist Beppe Crovella of Arti + Mestiere and Crovella's Electroromantic Studio in San Sebastiano da Pó (Italy) where this album was recorded.  Michel Delville's Roland gr-09 or guitar is flanged or phase shifted for a powerful, Crimsonesque fantasy leading to a repeated bedrock ascending staircase of a riff with a functionality vaguely reminiscent of The Beatles "I Want You (She's So Heavy)."  Alex Maguire's synth flute and Tony Bianco's drums are set free by Delville's cadence to create the earthquake soundscape full of newsworthy seismic events.  Melville's repeated line frays at the edges and then busts free at the end for a song both symphonic and improvised.  The love of melody and the drama of tension and release are elements of this story in fitting tribute to Beppe's Electroromantic aesthetic.