A Rainbow in Curved Air

There was a short but illuminating two-parter recently on BBC4 about minimalist music. The first part featured the enigmatic La Monte Young (whose famous pupil would play that haunting viola refrain on the Velvet Underground's 'Venus in Furs') and the reclusive Terry Riley, who now lives seemingly in a wooden cabin somewhere in the forests north of San Francisco. He's still making music and I'm still listening to A Rainbow in Curved Air. It would be another 20 years or so after buying my still pristine copy before I discovered the two composers featured in the second part, Philip Glass and Steve Reich.

These days, Riley sports a long white beard to match his thinning locks and looks like a shaman. Back then, on the cover of the LP, his prematurely balding hair frames a big smiling egg of a face that rises beaming like a human sun from the edge of a bucolic landscape. His benign words on the back speak of a time when 'The Pentagon was turned on its side and painted purple, yellow & green' and when 'The energy from dismantled nuclear weapons provided free heat and light/World health was restored/[And] an abundance of organic vegetables, fruits and grains was growing wild along the discarded highways'. If, as idyllic vision suggests, he is a vegan, he sure is an advert for the salubrious effects of renouncing meat and dairy.

Riley's Rainbow is a suitably bubbly, optimistic and vibrant piece that continues to surprise. I'd forgotten, for example, the passage half way through when the omnipresent electric organ sinks to a sonorous rumble and a tambourine mimics the sound of moths trapped in a paper bag. I guess that's why minimalist music has always (apparently) appealed to me. You immerse yourself in it like you would in a warm bath and all those subtle sudden key changes and harmonic twists keep you sufficiently alert to stop you sinking beneath the surface. It seems curious to suggest, but it is dramatic: like a film by Bergman or like the shadows cast on a landscape by scudding clouds.

And Riley does it all with an electric organ, an electric harpsichord, a rocksichord, a dumbec (whatever they are), a tambourine and endless tape loops. Almost 20 minutes of subtle variations on a very simple theme that leave you feeling curiously clean and energised. On the flip side, by contrast, 'Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band' is a darker repetitive drone created by the trusty organ and a soprano saxophone. Shades at times of John Coltrane and particularly the long introduction to Soft Machine's 'Out-Bloody-Rageous'. 

Being, as I was then, so immersed in prog-rock – as it would become known – I could probably hear Riley's influence in all kinds of places without even knowing it: especially on such organ-toting groups of the '70s as Yes, Soft Machine, Egg, Hatfield and the North. He must also have had an influence a little later on the likes of Vangelis and, emphatically, Mike Oldfield. And let's not forget that a group even called itself Curved Air. Yes, the genial Mr. Riley's to blame for all that pocket money I blew on a picture disc version of Air Conditioning that never played properly, presumably because of all the colour in the microgrooves. I couldn't listen to Curved Air now, but wish I'd kept that imperfect record. Must be worth a packet these days.

I'm surprised and rather proud to say that I bought Rainbow in 1971 as a mere 16-year old. Surprised because it seems so grown-up now in comparison to a lot of the stuff I was listening to. How did I come to minimalist music long before I even knew what it was? I was a subscriber to the Melody Maker and maybe they mentioned it in despatches. Or maybe I was influenced by my elders and betters at school. One Gavin McDowell in particular, an LP-carrying 'head' who was way ahead of the crowd. I suspect, though, that it was my love of Soft Machine's Third. I seem to have bought it in 1970, which suggests that I was looking for something on the same astral plane. I'd heard the imitators, so it was time to check out the source.

Despite my own love of the kind of jazz that inspired Riley, I never actually bought anything else by him – not even the legendary In C. Perhaps because Philip Glass and especially Steve Reich would later satisfy all my minimal needs. A Rainbow in Curved Air seems now just a little airy-fairy in comparison to something like Reich's magnificent Music for 18 Musicians with its bewildering interplay of yodelling voices, pulsing pianos, marimbas and oscillating clarinets.

The programme didn't really make clear the extent to which Riley influenced Philip Glass and Steve Reich. But of course he must have done. It's hard to believe that Glass could have written the soundtrack to Koyaanisqatsi without Riley's Rainbow. These days, the piece seems a little like music for old hippies, but then I'm just an old hippy at heart. A little older and a little hipper every play.