Soft Machine

Between 1975 and 1978 Soft Machine made three albums for EMI's Harvest label, and this box gathers them: Bundles, Softs and the live Alive & Well: Recorded in Paris. They cover the last stretch of the group, by now a British jazz-rock unit built on composed themes, tight riffs and long solos. As the Jazz Journal review of this set notes, they also mark the end of founding member Mike Ratledge's time in the band, and after Softs only one more studio album followed until 2018.

Bundles, released in April 1975, has Allan Holdsworth on electric, acoustic and 12-string guitars in his only album with the band. Karl Jenkins plays oboe, soprano saxophone and keyboards and wrote the five-part Hazard Profile, over the rhythm section of Roy Babbington on bass and John Marshall on drums, with Ratledge on organ and synthesizer. Holdsworth then left, and John Etheridge took the guitar chair for Softs, recorded at Abbey Road in spring 1976, where Jenkins wrote most of the pieces and Ratledge adds synthesizer parts to only two, Ban-Ban Caliban and Song of Aeolus. The live album comes from four concerts at the Théâtre Le Palace in Paris on 6 to 9 July 1977, with additional recording and mixing at Advision in London. The band produced the two studio albums, and Mike Thorne the live one.

The first disc opens with Hazard Profile, whose first section gives Holdsworth a long improvisation over Babbington and Marshall. The title track sets guitar and bass in winding unison before running into Land of the Bag Snake, and Ratledge's The Man Who Waved at Trains turns to Jenkins on soprano. Softs begins with Aubade, an acoustic duet between Etheridge and saxophonist Alan Wakeman, then moves into funk and fusion with Ban-Ban Caliban and the group-written One Over the Eight. On the third disc Steve Cook plays bass and Ric Sanders adds violin, heard at length in his own Surrounding Silence, while Etheridge wrote Number Three.

The three records appeared between April 1975 and March 1978. Reviewing this box in Jazz Journal, Elliot Marlow-Stevens observed that the band's many incarnations rarely share a line-up, and wrote of the Paris recording that "the sound is absolutely superb", despite the later studio work on it. He summed up the set as "an interesting, captivating and all-round excellent experience".

This 3CD clamshell box on Esoteric Recordings (ECLEC 32682) was first issued in 2019, with the albums remastered by Paschal Byrne and housed in replica card sleeves, together with a poster carrying photos and credits. The discs keep the original running orders, without bonus tracks.