{"title":"John Klemmer","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003eJohn Klemmer grew up in Chicago surrounded by Muddy Waters, Chess Records and the city's R\u0026amp;B scene, started alto saxophone at eleven, switched to tenor in high school, studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and Interlochen's National Music Camp, and signed to Cadet\/Chess Records in 1967 while still a teenager. The debut album there was co-produced by Marshall Chess, and \"Blowin Gold\" (Cadet, 1969), with its rock rhythms and innovative production techniques, is cited by multiple sources as one of the earliest jazz-rock fusion records. He moved to Impulse! for five albums in the early 1970s, where a Coltrane influence sat alongside Eddie Harris's electrified saxophone experiments in shaping his developing echoplex-augmented tenor sound, before ABC Records signed him and the trajectory changed completely. \"Touch\" (MCA, 1975) used the echoplex and a spare, melodic approach to produce something entirely new: intimate, production-heavy, deceptively simple solo saxophone music that reached a large pop and adult contemporary audience and is now widely credited as a direct precursor of smooth jazz. Klemmer himself described it as never commercially intended. The hip-hop sampling that followed in the 1990s brought a second wave of attention to those MCA and Elektra records. Two distinct careers with two distinct audiences, and they intersect uncomfortably.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"john-klemmer-waterfalls-1978-japanese-abc-impulse-vinyl-lp","title":"John Klemmer - Waterfalls (1978 Japanese ABC Impulse! Vinyl LP)","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eJohn Klemmer - \u003cem\u003eWaterfalls\u003c\/em\u003e | Vinyl LP - 1978 Japanese ABC Impulse! Reissue (YS-8511-AI, Cross Over Jazz series, Nippon Columbia)\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eWaterfalls\u003c\/em\u003e is the record that turned the Echoplex into a jazz instrument. John Klemmer was among the first saxophonists to run his horn through the tape-echo unit, and on this 1972 date, recorded live at the Ash Grove in Los Angeles and sweetened afterwards in the studio, he uses it to build something genuinely new: long, reverberating tenor and soprano lines that trail off into space, the musical equivalent of ripples spreading across still water. Behind him is a strong electric band, Mike Nock on Fender Rhodes, Wilton Felder of the Crusaders on bass, Eddie Marshall on drums and Victor Feldman on percussion, and the mood is loose, warm and hazy, psychedelic jazz with the lights down low. Klemmer wrote all eight pieces, and the two \"Waterfall\" themes and the long \"Utopia: Man's Dream\" are the heart of it. It is atmospheric, trippy, and unlike almost anything else on Impulse! at the time, a record that has quietly gathered a devoted following in the years since.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eKlemmer would later become one of the architects of smooth jazz, and his mid-seventies mood records sold in numbers this one never did, but \u003cem\u003eWaterfalls\u003c\/em\u003e belongs to the adventurous phase before all that, and it is the album the crate-diggers and electric-jazz obsessives keep coming back to. There is a nice detail buried in the credits, too: the Fender Rhodes is played by Mike Nock, the New Zealand-born pianist who would go on to become one of the central figures in Australian jazz.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis copy is the 1978 Japanese reissue on ABC Impulse!, part of the Cross Over Jazz series, manufactured by Nippon Columbia, catalogue number YS-8511-AI.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Impulse!","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43906659713083,"sku":null,"price":50.0,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0630\/3203\/3339\/files\/IMG_8133.jpg?v=1785759769"}],"url":"https:\/\/lushliferecords.com.au\/collections\/john-klemmer.oembed","provider":"Lush Life Records","version":"1.0","type":"link"}