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Re-Re-Release on Vanguard Records! E Pluribus Unum No Deposit, No Return Blues 17:03 With Sandy Bull on Telecaster, Oud, Bass, Tamboura, and Percussion Recorded 1968 at Sierra Sound, Berkeley and Vanguard Studios, New York City Produced by Sandy Bull and Jeff Zaraya First Performed in Public at the Indica Gallery, London, June 4, 1966 "I'd already done the other two albums with one track covering a side, so I figured why not! That whole record came about when I was in England in '66, listening to my amp on earphones so as not to disturb the folks in my hotel. I liked that sound, and found a hi-fi store in the West End, and he showed me how to put a tweeter in my Concert amp and make it sound balanced. That's what I used while I was in London...it evolved into a bigger system. I would plug treble and bass boosts in and split the signal...that's how we recorded the guitar on those two sides." 1968 Liner Notes by Nat Hentoff In music, if in few other realms, boundry lines are dissolving more and more rapidly. Or, as Wayne Shorter, a long-time colleague of Miles Davis, puts it: "The labels are being taken off the bottles." Sandy Bull, whose third album this is, was among the first of his generation to pour his own libations from so many different kinds of bottles. Libations to what? To discovery, to possibility, to finding more and more circles of cohesiveness from within and and from anywhere else that made contact. In his first two sets (Fantasias, 1963, and Inventions,1965, on Vanguard), there were elements, traces, transmutations of Hindu, Pakistani and Arabic music; American folk contours and colors (from Southern mountain songs to gospel and country blues); jazz; Bach and pre-Bach; and more. Sandy Bull had gone beyond eclecticism and was well engaged in a continually unpredictable journey into what could be called inner musical space where diversely rooted forms and textures flowed into and out of each other, creating in the process new ways of connecting, new spirals of cross-influences, leading into unexpectedly disclosed vaults of the senses where there were further doors to be opened. "I'm going to see where all this leads me," he said when Inventions was done. "I mean I'm going to keep on listening for what is going to come out of all the kinds of music that reach me, some of which I'm able to join together and others that I havn't been able to fuse yet." And here is another stage of Sandy Bull. Just as thoughts and feelings emerge in constantly shifting superimposition, so this music takes on simultaneous perspectives through multi-tracking. Sandy's primary instrument here is the electric guitar, with the output split four ways, simultaneously playing foot cymbals topped by a tamborine. He also plays oud, tamboura and various percussion. As I hear and feel this music, it would be directly contrary to the nature of Sandy Bull's odyssey to try to dissect and footnote the various strains of what is, after all, an ongoing process of musical transcendentalism. Particularly evident is the openness of both Electric Blend and No Deposit-No Return Blues. I mean not only the absence of hard-edged "cultural" boundries but also a sense of invitation to the listener to find his own modes of cohesiveness amid the undulating rhythms and intertwining voices. There is a remarkable freedom for each listener in these performances. The music is certainly distinctive, palpable, but it is offered, not imposed. And it is not offered as a sealed artifact. Rather it is given as part of a continuum of mutual discovery. What Sandy Bull is doing, it seems to me, is the creation of one life work in music. So far as recordings are concerned, this is stage three--a stop in time but also a reaffirmation, to use Wayne Shorter's words again, that "everything is en route, everything is in the interim."
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