Mountains Come Out of the Sky by Will Romano

Author:Will Romano [Romano, Will]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781617133756
Publisher: Backbeat Books
Published: 2013-12-06T05:00:00+00:00

ACQUIRING THE TASTE

Simon Dupree folded, and Gentle Giant, whose name was inspired by François Rabelais’s sixteenth-century work Gargantua and Pantagruel (a book Phil had read), formed in 1970. Along with the brothers Shulman (lead vocalist /saxophonist Derek, bassist/violinist Ray, and saxophonist/trumpeter Phil), Giant featured keyboardist/percussionist Kerry Minnear (a composition major who had attended the Royal Academy of Music with a concentration in piano and percussion), guitarist Gary Green (a blues rocker who’d been in a North Londonbased band called Fishhook), and former Simon Dupree drummer Martin Smith.

Encouraged by then-manager Gerry Bron to experiment, Giant exploited the fact that they featured multi-instrumentalist members. “We had a group of characters who were generally good musicians and well trained and from different worlds,” says Derek Shulman. “Ray was a classically trained violin player but also loved jazz. I was a singer, a pop singer, and had learned to play saxophones. Phil played trumpet and sax as well. Gary was an incredible blues player with incredible technique.”

In 1970, the band recorded their self-titled debut album (appearing on the Vertigo label) with producer Tony Visconti (who Shulman says “introduced us to the recorder,” an instrument the band later used onstage for “recorder quartets”).

While Shulman admits that the band, during the writing and recording stages, behaved more as six individuals than as a single creative unit, the album is rarely ponderous, despite the fairly long compositions and many different elements the band stirs up.

Songs such as “Giant,” “Isn’t It Quiet and Cold?” “Alucard,” “Why Not?” and “Nothing At All” display the band’s multicolored stripes proudly, with church organ textures, bluesy guitar riffs, layered harmonies (four of the six members sing on the record), synthesizer-driven jazz-rock, touches of “early music” (at this time, composer/bassoonist /pianist/recorder player and professor at the Royal Academy of Music David Munrow was instrumental in a rebirth of interest in European Renaissance and medieval music), a flair for rhythmic bombast, and chamberlike retro-pop.

“We were babies on the first record,” says Shulman. “Where it was going to go, we had no clue.”

By the band’s sophomore record, 1971’s Acquiring the Taste, Giant had expanded upon and improved its sound to include Renaissance hymns (à la Palestrina and Holst, both Minnear influences), counterpoint vocal structures, backward audio snippets, orchestral drumming and percussion, angular musical sections (à la Bartók), rapid changes of complex tempos, a hint of medieval balladry, intricately interweaving baroque musical lines, and Green’s ever-present blues guitar grit in songs such as “Pentagruel’s Nativity” (another reference to Rabelais), “Edge of Twilight,” the title track, “The House, the Street, the Room,” “The Moon Is Down,” and “Plain Truth.”

“Ray was the younger brother,” says Kerry Minnear, “and he was the one who was musically most creative, in my opinion. Phil had great ideas, but most of the musical lines came from Ray. I remember he always wrote awfully difficult keyboard parts, too: The [finger] spacings would be different for every chord. In the earlier days, especially, Ray would write a line and then write another over the top of it.

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