Phil Manzanera: Revolución To Roxy

This quite lovely album is a soundtrack of sorts to Roxy Music guitarist Phil Manzanera’s memoir of the same name, and though there is nothing specifically Roxy-related about the music, it contains songs whose history goes back as far as his first solo record in 1975 and as recently as the sessions for last year’s AM/PM, his collaboration with fellow Roxy alumnus Andy Mackay. The book takes Manzanera from his childhood roots in Latin America (Venezuela, Colombia and revolutionary Cuba) to pop stardom, his latter-day career as guitarist and producer to the stars and his current status as an elder statesman of guitar. The songs on the album aren’t presented chronologically, but they form a kind of allusive narrative that brings together a range of cultural and musical influences with delicacy, charm and imagination; but don’t expect any glam rock.

Though a bona fide guitar hero, Manzanera has rarely been a conventional one. During the years of his early career especially, his work is notable for the way in which he experiments tirelessly with tones and textures to make the guitar sound as unorthodox – sometimes as un-guitarlike – as possible. But that, mostly, is not the Phil Manzanera that Revolución to Roxy presents. Mirroring to an extent the action of the book, and therefore his life story, the album opens with some strongly South American-flavored music. The beautiful “Magdalena” from his 2015 album The Sound of Blue features some of his loveliest and most conventional, even sentimental guitar playing. In 2015 Manzanera was fresh from working as a producer on Pink Floyd’s The Endless River, and his soloing has a David Gilmour-like fluidity and bluesy poetry. The warm, airy texture of the music gently evokes the mellow Latin American nights, and the song is a beautiful and moving tribute to the surroundings of his childhood. The Latin spirit flows through the first part of the album, which takes in two new pieces, the dramatic, passionate “Pizzica De La Matina” featuring two violinists, Anna Phoebe and Mauro Durante, master of the Italian pizzica taranta style. It’s a beautifully balanced piece in which Manzanera’s hot, melting tone contrasts beautifully with the thinner, sharper sound of the frantic violins, while the bass and drums keep the whole piece grounded. Neither rock nor folk nor classical but drawing on all of them, it’s exactly the kind of eclectic, boundary-erasing music that Manzanera has always specialized in. That’s also true of the more contemporary-sounding, “Matolo,” which marries a heavy funk groove with gleaming, incandescent guitar melodies and strangely-toned synths with celestially cinematic results; boundary-crossing rather than boundary-pushing, there’s a familiarity to the music that makes it easy to listen to, but it’s skilful and inventive and never boring.

Two tracks recorded with Andy Mackay for their AM/PM album have an entirely different, more explicitly experimental atmosphere. “Music for French Horn and Drain” could almost be the work of Floating Points or Four Tet, a shifting synths-and-samples soundscape with a powerfully melancholy feel and some lovely horn textures. It’s as good as anything on AM/PM and Mackay’s closing sax phrases in particular are heartbreakingly atmospheric, so its non-appearance on that album is mysterious; but even if everything else on Revolución To Roxy was subpar – which it definitely isn’t – the album would be worth having for this track. The other Manzanera/Mackay track, “Lady of the Lake” is lovely too. A lush, orchestral piece with a mournful grandeur against which Manzanera plays strongly bluesy, Gary Moore-esque guitar, it’s probably the album’s most obvious, almost cheesy guitar hero moment, but the way Manzanera’s guitar seamlessly morphs into Mackay’s sax and back again is stunning. When the two play together, it doesn’t sound even remotely like Roxy Music, but the pair’s musical chemistry together is as comfortable but impressive as always.

Following the tranquil, soaring majesty of “Lady of the Lake, there’s a slightly jarring change of tone as the lineup of “Pizzica De La Matina” returns, this time with double bass virtuoso Yaron Stavi for “Mauranna.” A percussive, dance-oriented Middle Eastern-inflected tune, it’s a richly layered, intensely colorful piece, with Stavi’s very musical plucked bass the still center amid sawing violins, cascading guitar and kaleidoscopic ascending harmonies. The remainder of the album consists of four live tracks recorded in Seville at the Guitar Legends ‘91 expo, which previously appeared on 1995’s superior odds-and-ends anthology The Manzanera Collection. The songs he plays are of various ages; there’s a version of his ’75 debut single “Frontera,” a jazzy version of the title track of his 1990 album Southern Cross, a then-new track “Leyenda” and “Sphinx,” which had originally been recorded for the 1988 compilation Guitar Speak. Disparate origins, but all are united by the searing tone and fluidity of Manzanera’s guitar. Of the four, the pulsing electronica of “Leyenda,” and the dramatic, stadium soft-rock of “Frontera” are perhaps the most adventurous, but the brooding expanses of the almost Miles Davis-like version of “Southern Cross” allow Manzanera to show off the superb delicacy of his most economical manner, while “Sphinx” showcases his less familiar but intensely communicative dirty, bluesy style.

Overall, Revolución to Roxy is everything the fan of Manzanera’s guitar playing would want it to be; unless that is, they regard Roxy Music as the pinnacle of his career. Manzanera himself clearly doesn’t, and that may be the point. The South American music of his childhood clearly left an indelible mark on his musical personality, but one which was very little use in Bryan Ferry’s compositions, and it’s probably no coincidence that the Latin-flavored music brings out his most ebullient performances. There’s nothing on Revolución to Roxy that sounds quite as wayward and peculiar as Manzanera’s work on the first two Roxy albums, ‘75’s Diamond Head or the underrated 801 albums, but it makes a strong case for him as one of the great, relatively orthodox guitar players of his generation, quite aside from his other persona as a bold innovator.