Fifty years on, Robert Wyatt's unique music continues to entertain and impress and has been given new life by Daniel Yvinec of France's Orchestre National de Jazz.
WERE Robert Wyatt your only source of Robert Wyatt information, you would conclude he was the most useless scrub ever to presume to make records. Repeatedly during our hour-long telephone chat he refers to himself as ''rubbish'', insists how little he knows about music, or deflects questions by discussing someone else.
Yet Wyatt is that rarest of musical creatures: a mould-breaker who continues to crack them nearly 50 years on. Perhaps his nearest equivalent is Tom Waits, but where Waits has used theatricality as another instrument, Wyatt has always been charmingly homespun.
That term is especially apt for his recent output, made layer by layer in the Lincolnshire home he shares with his wife, artist Alfie Benge.
Wyatt's albums allow his deep appreciation of pop, jazz and 20th-century classical music to mingle gently and unselfconsciously. That same unselfconsciousness was present when Wyatt played in arguably the first band to meld rock and jazz, the Wilde Flowers, which became the ground-breaking Soft Machine in 1966. Wyatt dismisses the innovation as just an awareness of musical possibilities.
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