Trip to the Mars (Remastered) Orchester Roland Kovac

• 1 Space Station I 02:26
• 2 Service I 01:28
• 3 Heat 01:13
• 4 Sound Barrier 01:08
• 5 Marasonde 03:05
• 6 Northern Lights 00:49
• 7 Service II 01:07
• 8 The Green Star 02:00
• 9 Munich On the Mars 01:23
• 10 Power Start 02:59
• 11 Milky Way 02:59
• 12 Colossus 01:39
• 13 Service III 01:12
• 14 Computer 01:40
• 15 Mooncrater 00:37
• 16 Blue Dance 03:38
• 17 Space Station II 03:33
• Total Runtime 32:56

Info for Trip to the Mars (Remastered)

At long last this extremely rare “concept LP” by the pianist and arranger Dr. Roland Kovac is available once more. The cover photo is a feast for the eyes, while the music is sheer delight for the ears.

Amazingly enough, this music was originally recorded as an advertising gag for an atomic power plant. The plant was never put into operation how- ever: luckily Roland Kovac persuaded SABA to take over the production costs and the sound tapes.

The soloists all came from West German Radio’s Kurt Edelhagen Big Band, and all are excellent interpreters of this complicated collage of short melodic fragments.

Unfortunately this exceptional orchestra never performed in public – it was a studio band. In the mid-sixties, top European musicians congregated in Munich to record background music for radio and television. The big band played compositions and arrangements written by Dr. Roland Kovac, a brilliant musician whose career began with the Vienna Boys Choir. As his career progressed, he became an “all-purpose writer and one of the big earners in popular music” (DER SPIEGEL). Kovac produced some 2000 musical works, including jazz pieces with such original titles as Bath Water and Goin My Hemming-way, as well as film music and advertising jingles for AEG appliances and 4711 Cologne. By the time he recorded his Trip to the Mars suite in 1964, Kovac had his roots in the jazz field; he was the pianist in saxophonist Hans Koller’s quintet, and was already a much sought-after big band arranger (his doctoral thesis was “Harmonic Structure in the Music of the Late Baroque Period”). Joachim-Ernst Berendt prized his music as a “uniquely independent contribution to the European scene”. Kovac’s Mars suite begins on a shrill note. It contains blues and bop passages. With the movement Munich on the Mars, the rocking jazz band transforms itself into a thumping brass band. There’s the kind of humor in this wide-ranging work that would work well as the soundtrack of a space or a crime series.

"This dynamite 1964 big-band date by composer/arranger Roland Kovac is a highlight in a very storied career -- and one that has a unique history as well. Kovac was a renaissance man of German music. He composed and recorded music for every occasion in a wide variety of settings, from classical to jingles, from jazz to film scores. This session, betrayed hilariously by its cover, was cut to accompany an industrial film that was an advertising ploy for a nuclear power plant. Kovac had the budget to hire a slew of top flight soloists, whom he found in one place: Karl Edelman's Big Band. They include Charles Drewo on tenor, drummer Jimmy Pratt, trumpeter Jimmy Deuchar, trombonist Cliff Hardy, altoist Derek Humble, bassist Johnny Fisher, pianist Francis Coppetiers, and vibist/percussionist Stuff Combe. At the time, these cats were a who's-who of Western Europe's prized session men. The plant was never opened, and Kovac, understanding how special the session was, persuaded Saba to purchase the tapes and eventually release them on its MPS imprint. While the cover image has "space age bachelor pad" written all over it, the music is anything but. Composed as a 17-part suite, bop, blues, hard bop, and cool jazz flow throughout the tunes, while Kovac's charts are impeccable and showcase the brilliance and contrasting voices of his soloists. While the music commences with a cinematic intro theme on "Space Station 1" that recalls both Neil Hefti and Buddy Rich, it quickly evolves into a knotty, fingerpopping bop tune with colorful harmonics. "Heat" is a swinging big-band blues with a neat solo break from Deuchar. There is deliberate humor in "Munich on the Mars" that walks the tightrope between modern classical and circus music, while "Power Start" is pure, progressive big band. Another highlight, "Milky Way," is a dreamy, expressionist piece that portrays just how much beauty Kovac could evoke from both the influences of Ravel and Lester Young. Humble's, Deuchar's, Hardy's and Drewo's solos atop the repetitive horn lines and silky vibes playing are all expressive and canny. "Mooncrater" has more in common with the painterly soundscapes of Gil Evans than virtually anything coming out of Europe at the time, while "Blue Dance" underscores this with its modal blues framework. Trip to the Mars is essential not just for Kovac fans, but for anyone interested in progressive big band and '60s vintage European jazz. Perhaps the only "tragedy" here is that this group never played this music live." (Thom Jurek, AMG)

Orchester Roland Kovac
Jimmy Deuchar, trumpet
Cliff Hardy, trombone
Derek Humble, alto saxophone
Charles Drewo, tenor saxophone
Johnny Fisher, bass
Francis Coppieters, piano
Jimmy Pratt, drums
Stuff Combe, percussion

Digitally remastered

Roland Kovac
was still a teenager when this and his own combos began working, but it was hardly the beginnings of his musical activities. He had begun piano lessons at six, clarinet at 13. From 1935 through 1938 he was a member of the Vienna Boys' Choir and remains one of the few instrumentalists listed in international jazz reference works who can make such a claim. During the war he played for an audience that included Jews on the run, soldiers on official as well as unofficial leave from their units, and locals with their eyes cocked for secret police. Among the military swingers was saxophonist Hans Koller, a follower not of the Third Reich but of Lee Konitz. Kovac and Koller began working together, their impulses toward playing pure forms of jazz at odds with the sway of public taste once life in Vienna began getting back to normal.

Kovac followed Koller out of the country looking for appropriate gigs. They really didn't have to go very far, finding opportunities in both the film and broadcast mediums as well as concert venues on the considerably larger German jazz scene. The MPS label, associated with one of the largest tape manufacturers in the world, had plenty of resources with which to document the eventual turn toward progressive jazz stylings, most notably the electric jazz and fusion of the '60s and '70s. Trip to the Mars from 1964 is without a doubt this artist's most unique venture, credited to the Orchester Roland Kovac and featuring a style some have described as "science-fiction jazz." The Roland Kovac New Set came along in the early '70s, basically a collaboration between Kovac and guitarist Siegfried "Sigi" Schwab. The latter used his fuzzbox in an eventually shortfall attempt to drown out first drummer Charly Antolini, then Keith Fisher. Keyboardist Brian Auger, no slouch, joined in on the second of this group's efforts. In 1981 Kovac recorded Piano Symphony -- Selected Sound 92 for the Deutsche Austrophon imprint.

This album contains no booklet.