EXCLUSIVE: Judge Smith interview (Part Two)

I particularly enjoyed my chat with Judge Smith the other night. As I wrote in the first part of this interview yesterday, it was less like an interview and more an informal chat, which is - I believe - the way these things shoud be conducted.

Most of what we discussed was about his song-stories, particularly Orfeas...

Jon: What I thought was particularly nice about the way that you did it, was that it was totally and utterly unpretentious

Judge: Thank you

Jon: Whereas even trying to explain it makes it pretentious, trying to put it in words, it is actually just – you are tapping into an ancient tradition of telling a story with some jokes in it, while putting it to music

Judge: I do find it difficult doing it without putting the jokes in so it does tend to prevent too much self-importance or pretentiousness creeping in, because I feel compelled to put a gag in every so often.

Jon: I like Goerge Orpheus’ line about the audience being like meerkats. My wife and I laughed out loud at that and we had to pause the bloody cd because we were giggling too much

Judge: I got that off a friend of mine. A young lady I know who is cabin crew on Easyjet and they call the passengers the meerkats because you stand up at the end and you just see these little heads popping up and down, peering up over the seats. So I pinched it.

Jon: How many of them have you done so far, the song stories?

Judge: There are three. Orfeas is the third. Curly’s Airships is the first and in the middle comes The Climber. I don’t know if you’ve got that one have you Jon?

Jon: Yes, it is still in the shrink wrap on my dining room table. I have had a house full of people for the last few weeks, and I want to do it justice, rather than listen to it with half an ear whilst doing something completely different..

Judge: That is probably my favourite actually. Of all of them. But it has a very different line up in that it was written for an unaccompanied Norwegian male voice choir, and me, and a double bass and that’s it.

Jon: Now, that is a line you don’t hear very often. Now I don’t know which one to listen to first. I had my evening planned out and now you’ve put me in a quandary

Judge: Well I’ll be interested to know what you think of The Climber. It raises eyebrows because it’s got no guitars or drums in it, but it’s rock and roll to me. It’s just sung by a male voice choir.

Jon: Well they both sound wonderful. Hopefully I’ll get to listen to them both over the weekend. I don’t know which one I will listen to first.

Judge: The Climber is much shorter. It is a much shorter piece, but it follows the song story idea through. I’ve got the hang of this thing now

Jon: Are you planning more?

Judge: Well, I don’t know. I have been working very hard for a couple of years now, well since Orfeas I haven’t really stopped and I’m working on an album at the moment and I think when that is finished in a few months time I am going to take a break, and sort of take stock. Yes, there are two stories that are sitting there waiting that I would like to do but I don’t quite know in what form or format or how yet and I am going to take a break from inflicting my music on the world.

Jon: I wouldn’t do that

Judge: I am not retiring but I am going to take a breather I think. But there are a couple of things I could do, yes certainly, perhaps shorter, perhaps get both of them both on to a cd I don’t know

Jon: When was Orfeas recorded then?

Judge: Orfeas has got a funny sort of history. I started it before I started The Climber and everything went on hold for a year while I recorded and edited The Climber

Jon: Oh I didn’t realise.

Judge: Yes. Recorded the band numbers – George Orpheus’ band – in 2008, so the thing was written - or a lot of it was written - but then I got the opportunity to do The Climber which I had written before, but it had languished because I couldn’t find a choir. I was fortunate then to be approached by Ricardo Odriozola. He is Basque and lives in Norway, and is a violin professor at the Grieg Institute in Bergen. A wonderful chap with an encyclopaedic knowledge of rock music and a most fascinating and remarkable man, and I couldn’t have done this without him.

I don’t have the musical skills to do choir orchestrations and so on. I am very simple in terms of music: I don’t read music, I can’t play anything either; I can drum and I can sing, but I hear the music in my head in great detail, but then I have to struggle to get it out there. I am very ham-fisted with musical instruments, but technology is great. The computer has liberated me really. I can produce the melodies, chord sequences, the bass lines I can hear in my head so computer technology has been fantastic for me even though I don’t make computer sounding music, and I like it played by proper musicians once I‘ve written it, but I couldn’t have written it without the technology

There was a brief interlude while I asked Judge how to spell Ricardo Odriozola's name, and we digressed slightly..

Judge: On a wall of his place in Bergen there is a whole collection of all the wrongly addressed envelopes that he has received. A very great man. And he organised the choir for me and the whole thing was recorded in Norway so I was very, very fortunate indeed so because I had that opportunity Orpheus went on hold for a full year, having got half of it recorded every stopped when I did The Climber and then I had to go back to Orfeas... complicated.

Jon: Life does tend to get complicated. So the thing you are working on at the moment. Is that an ordinary – is there such a thing as an ordinary – album?

Judge: That’s a songs album. And I am working on that with a wonderful American arranger and producer called David Minnick.

Jon: I know that name

Judge: He was involved in Orfeas, he did some of the arrangements on Orfeas as well so you might have seen him in that book. He was part of the American ska revival in the ‘90s, there a lot of American ska bands, quite a lot of ska bands and he was part of that movement, and he has a wonderful album called I Didn’t Know I Was Singing. It’s telephone answering machine messages set to music with the speech music technique that I use in Orpheus, that’s why I got on to him because he was far and away the best person.

Jon: That’s why I know the name. I read an interview with you about that. I got really intrigued by speech music

Judge: It is a fascinating technique, it’s one that requires more musicianship than I’ve got really, but it has been fascinating working with it, and I think I shall probably use it again, but David is very facile with it; very skilled at doing it, but he is an amazing producer and this is a song album, there is no speech music in it or anything particularly avant garde. It is an album of songs that I have had, some of which have been sitting around for a very long time, waiting for me to get around to recording them. And so he is producing and it is his band, his orchestra, his musicians who are doing the recording and I’m doing the singing.

Jon: Any idea when it is coming out

Judge: Well I don’t think it will be too long. I would imagine it would be finished by the autumn. Though when it will actually come out I am not too sure. Probably by the new year I would think.

Jon: I look forward to that

Judge: I haven’t got a title – I think it is bad luck to give things a title that don’t exist. It will be unlike anything I have ever done before because it’s got...... it just is ...... It’s an American album, it’s got that full rock sound that I couldn’t do. It’s very exciting. And it is somebody else doing the heavy lifting. And that’s good

Jon: That’s always a good thing, in whatever genre

Judge: Well I don’t subscribe now to the do it yourself completely self-contained ethos. You get so much from using other people, and it is just a question of letting go to just the right extent. Relinquishing just sufficient control to get the most of other people.

Jon: I don’t think rock and roll is just a solitary experience. It always has been a joint activity

That - for once - wasn't me being naughty. I used to do the news pages for a tropical fish magazine into which I slipped as many drug jokes as I could, but on this occasion I am not guilty

Judge: I agree, it’s a balancing act. If you get too democratic about you end up with a jam session

Jon: Which are fun to play but bloody awful to listen to

Judge: It’s like free music which I did a little of in the ‘70s it’s tremendous fun to do but not much fun for people to listen to. I do like working with proper musicians. I do like that. So I don’t really want to do everything holed up in a room on my own.

At that point I realised that we had been chatting for over half an hour, and that my sweet wife (who had to do the transcribing) would never forgive me if I carried on much longer, so I drew the conversation to a halt. I think we were both disappointed, and look forward to carrying on our chat again soon...

EXCLUSIVE: Judge Smith Interview Part One

I have been interviewing people for a long time, and there are some who are better interviewees than others, but the rarest (and most valuable, to my way of thinking) interviewee is the one, with whom you immediately have a rapport, and find yourself talking with so naturally that you forget that you are doing an interview with them.

One such interviewee is Judge Smith. He was actually the first person that I wrote about on the Gonzo Blog all those weeks ago, and was the first person that I contacted by email. It so happened that for reasons so dull, I won’t bore you with them, I didn’t get around to actually talking to him until earlier this evening, but he was well worth the wait.

It turned out that we had quite a few interests in common. He is a reader of Fortean Times, a magazine that I have written for over the years, and even has a copy of On the Track of Unknown Animals by Bernard Heuvelmans (he pronounced it correctly, “Hoy-vel-mans” rather than “Hugh-vel-mans”) which, as my day job is the Director of the world’s largest cryptozoological organisation, is quite a coincidence.

“I did a musical called The Ascent of Wilberforce 3. a mountaineering musical which had a singing yeti in it”, he told me.

(For those of you who need to know such things, it was done at the Travis Theatre in Edinburgh and the Lyric, Hammersmith in 1978ish.)
So the interview just started, without either of us actually realising it…

Jon: How did the idea of the song stories come about?

Judge: Well I was always concerned about telling stories with music. I’ve always liked the idea of that. My regular song lyrics tend to be story lyrics when I’ve written an individual song there does tend to be a story in them, and I was also at that time or starting doing rock music at the time that the idea was current for rock music to do more than just do a three minute song. The long song started to become a possibility and this was something that Peter Hammill was interested in. So we were both starting off at that point so the idea of doing a long piece or longer pieces and the idea of telling stories sort of came together.

In the mid-70s, I started to write a song cycle. Supposedly it was going to be an album called The Kibbo Kift about a breakaway movement from the boy scouts. This was a factual thing, a factual subject, and well worth a look on the internet...

So I did just that, and found - to my amazement - that (once again) there were paralells to the things that I have been doing over the years. According to the Wikipedia article on the movement it had been inspired in part by the woodcraft laid down in the books of Ernest Thompson Seton, someone whom I had researched many years ago during my work on singing mice. This is true. Honest! You couldn't make stuff like this up!

I found this was a fascinating bit of history, and this was going to be a song cycle, like a concept album only we played it to Chris Parr, a theatre director, and he was very keen to put it on the stage. So we turned it into a musical. Still in exactly the same format, we merely staged it. This was done at the Travis theatre, the Edinburgh Festival and also at the Lyric, Hammersmith the following year, (1976). And this started myself and my songwriter at the time, Maxwell Hutchinson, on a series of stage musicals of different kinds.

One of these was pretty traditional, and didn’t actually get produced (traditional being where there is talking and then there is a song). Others which were more like operas, and eventually I became disenchanted with doing things in the theatre because it is just so difficult to get right – it is so difficult to get singing actors, well it was at the time, and it’s very difficult to make a good job of these shows with the kind of budgets that were available in subsidised theatre, to do a good musical show costs a great deal of money and I became disillusioned as to how well it was possible to do these things. How long they take to do and get on is unbelievable.

So I stopped doing those after a show called Mata Hari that I wrote with Lene Lovich, and that was the last stage musical I wanted to be involved with. But I still like the idea of telling a full length story with music so I evolved this sort of hybrid musical form which I call song story, or rather, John Ellis my guitar playing friend, named it song story. 'Cos I said what the hell am I going to call these things and he said call them song stories.

Jon: That’s an inspired idea, the name

Judge: It does what it says on the tin

Jon: The nearest that I’ve ever come to what you do with the song stories is the radio plays that Pete Townsend has done a couple of times. I don’t know if you heard the radio play he did of Lifehouse back, I think, for the Millennium Eve for the BBC

Judge: I remember reading about them. No, I have never heard it. He’s a clever chap, I’m sure they would be excellent. I ought to check those out. Well Tommy was a prototype in the genre...

For those of you interested, the radio play can be found as the last CD in the 6 CD Lifehouse Chronicles box set, which costs an insane amount of money. I also recommend the 1993 CD Psychoderelict which is another musical radio play..

Judge: If you are going to a song, then a song, then a song etc., it is incredible difficult to tell a story. It would take 8 or 9 hours before you can get a story done in that format. The format is very limiting you have got to be able to split things up. Do a musical where you can have short passages, short bits, things that don’t form themselves into a song, and you have got to be able to put those things together. Then you can start to convey a narrative. I have tried to do it just with songs - it is incredibly difficult. That’s how The Kibbo Kift, the first one, worked it was a series of songs but it was very hard to do and make sense and carry the whole narrative through.

This is the problems that leads to things like War of the Worlds where you have to have a narrator speaking in order to fill in the gaps. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but it is not doing the whole job with words and music.

Jon: In Orfeas you actually went through a very, very old, in fact an ancient tradition, and had a 'chorus' didn’t you?

A Greek chorus (Greek: χορός, khoros) is a homogeneous, non-individualised group of performers in the plays of Classical Greece who comment with a collective voice on the dramatic action. The concept was taken by Shakespeare in Henry V with a single 'Chorus' who provided a commentary to what was going on.

Judge: Yes. I fancied the idea of trying to maintain some sort of contact with the idea of this story of an ancient myth, and my friend David Shaw Parker, who is an actor and what he calls a Mediterranean guitar player, in other words flamenco influenced acoustic guitarist, and a good singer, and a very funny man. I thought great, he wanted to be involved, so I created this idea of the bard for him to do, which is how a lot of my things tend to happen. I know who is available and who wants to be involved in a project, and then I work out how to use the stuff they do in order to tell my story.

Jon: Well, if the truth were known, probably Aristophanes or whoever it was who used that style first probably did exactly the same thing. There was some mate of his just down the road who played the lute he thought would be perfect for the part

Judge: Absolutely. Well it is, not wishing to be portentous, but the stories were originally sung in the great tradition the Greek epics were designed to be sung, Beowulf would have been sung to a harp or whatever, and so there is nothing new about binding a story with music and of course it has led to opera and so on, but it is a slightly different thing....

And there we must leave you for today. I would like to thank my lovely wife Corinna for transcribing the interview which is going to run over either two or three parts, and also - of course - to Judge, for being such an interesting and lively interviewee.

Whilst on the subject, why not check out Judge's Gonzo Artist page, with details of his CDs for sale through the company:

http://www.gonzomultimedia.co.uk/site.php?s=2&action=list_table&t=products&filter_id=152&dbf_search_for=Judge+Smith+%28artist%29&image.x=9&image.y=11

LINK: Judge Smith French Review

Another repost of a French review - the original post can be found HERE

Rating: 7.5/10 His name sounds perhaps like a distant echo in the memory of some. Judge Smith is indeed the co-founder of Van der Graaf Generator with Peter Hammill , although it has left the adventure start 1969 before recording the first 33 laps of this group. Occupied by various musical projects, from design stage performances to composing for other artists, creating an opera of modern music in a TV series and even a film, Judge Smith expects 1991 to produce his first album, a collection of songs written between 1968 and 1977 ("Democrazy") and 1993 for his first original album is finally born ("Dome Of Discovery"). In the 2000s, he moves up a gear than seven CDs released since, one of which, "Curly's Airship", he says is the most ambitious rock album ever produced to date. "Curly's Airship" is also the firstSongstory , name that gives a narrative form of music he loves and whose "Orfeas" is the third avatar. The man is complex and analysis of his music proves it. Indeed, "Orfeas" is certainly an ambitious and complex concept. Beyond the argument (revisiting the myth of Orpheus by modernizing, becoming a rock guitarist Orpheus and Eurydice idolized his muse that he will eventually), it is especially the bias of the composition s 'is original. Judge Smith has decided to register by September formations of different musical styles, each being associated with a training style. We discover, therefore, in order of appearance on the disc, a Greek bard singing so hard on bombastic guitar arpeggios Hispanic, the Orfeas Band, rock band, Judge Smithusing his technique of speech music on the soliloquies of Orfeas , a technique also used in interviews complimented with a string sextet, techno music to symbolize the passage from dream to reality of the heroes of classic opera songs way between Orpheas and Eurydice, played by Lene Lovich and finally a group of metal for the tragic end of the story. If the bard who plays the role of narrator is amusing at best, annoying at worst, the string sextet mixing romantic and contemporary music and that there is not much to say about the passages techno and metal very marked in their respective genres, back on the other three sets. Orfeas The Band plays instrumental rock classic, even if an instrument is an accordion relatively discreet. It serves mainly as a backdrop to the two soloists are impeccable as John Ellis and David Jackson .John Ellis (the "hands of Orfeas") treats us gratifying guitar solos and removed. David Jackson shines for her many saxophone in However, a register wiser than he who was in his VDGG . The duets between Judge Smith and Lene Lovitch resemble vocal improvisations: no guidelines really emerges from these "songs", this is a conversation where protagonists are expressed in these notes as in musicals where the music follows the text and not the other. Finally the six soliloquies and two interviews using an original technique called speech music whereby every inflection of the voice is converted into its equivalent music. The "score" is then created and played by an instrument whose sound is superimposed on the voice, generating an echo phenomenon, all served on a discreet orchestration. The effect is pretty amazing and made ​​the soliloquies are sufficiently short that the surprise did not turn into annoyance. All these styles are intertwined in the album, giving a report to the staff and less chaotic. Unnecessary to consider what was coming off the lot titles, "Orfeas" is an indivisible whole that we appreciate as a whole or rejected as totally. But creativity, inventiveness, attention to detail, the factual quality of the interpretation are undeniable. All sprinkled with a healthy dose of humor. As for assessing the results, it's just a matter of personal taste.

JUDGE SMITH: Another great review for Orfeas

http://shakefire.com/reviews/cd/judge-smith-orfeas

Submitted by AJ Garcia on Friday, April 6, 2012 - 6:30AM

Artist: Judge Smith

Album: Orfeas

Members: Judge Smith, John, David Jackson,Marco Olivotto, Bert Santilly, John Ellis, David Shaw-Parker, Lene Lovich, Black Path, Rene van Commenee, Ricardo Odriozola, Ben Nation, Dorie Jackson, David Minnick

Genre: Blues, Classical, Folk, Jazz, Metal,Pop, Rock

Label: AIS

Tracks: 34

Type: LP

Release Date: April 3, 2012

Discs: 1

Rating: 4.05 (out of 4.00)

GRADE: A

Official Site

Also Contains:

32 page booklet with articles, the full text (and you'll want the text) and around 30 photographs, most specially commissioned and not available on-line, and it comes in a heavy-duty 'super jewel-case' box. ~J.S. Official Site

Orpheus is quite literally a rock opera, retelling the ancient Greek tale of Orfeas, the magical musician who traveled to the land of the dead in search of the lost Eurydice. In Smith’s version Orfeas is a rockstar of sorts whose ability to play the guitar is unrivaled and throughout the album you get various doses of guitar styles from flamenco musings serving as the voice of introduction to other instruments mimicking voice overs during faux interviews, it’s actual quite bizarre yet brilliant.

Judge Smith isn’t alone in his mission to reproduce the ancient Greek tragedy, the production has about sixteen players in all, each playing their own instrument, some of who formerly played alongside Smith in his 70’s Progressive Rock band Van Der Graaf Generator. It’s simply a huge production that runs the gamut of styles from Death Metal to Rock to Classical. It truly is a strange album which runs a contrast with so many different musical idea’s, like the silliness of Frank Zappa to the dark ominous theatrical side of Pink Floyd. With each tune your never quite sure what your going to get, but by the end your pretty sure you’ve just witnessed something insanely good. As always final judgment is yours. Enjoy.

If you haven't bought this album already (why not?) you can get it from:
http://www.gonzomultimedia.co.uk/product_details/15450

JUDGE SMITH: They love him in Israel

JUDGE SMITH - Orfeas Gonzo 2012

http://dmme.net/reviews/reviews49.html#wally An ancient Greek hero as a Wembley-straddling guitar hero: a VAN DER GRAAF originator twists the myth with much verve and imagination. Lurking in Peter Hammill's shadow, Judge Smith is no less adept with a word and a tune, a string of albums and stage productions under his belt, so his "songstories" gained a certain following which is bound to grow after this, the British veteran's third one. To see Orpheus in the modern spotlight is, perhaps, not that original an idea but to project a dilemma of an artist, who has to deliver his crowd-pleasing money-making hits while longing for creation of something, on the famous "to hell and back" anabasis - where a glance behind one's shoulder means losing the Muse - is interesting move, indeed. That's all theory, yet Smith shaped it in practice as a rock opera, a tag that Judge's quite unwilling to apply, even though one can see similarities between his protagonist being unwell and staying at the hotel instead of playing a big festival and Pink in "The Wall", but there's more experimentation in the George Orfeas near-death experience. Great librettist as he is, Smith makes unnoticed the absence of rhymes on most of the songs as well as the melodies and recital unison, a result of speech transformation into music so gripping feel the story's peripeties and so strong is delivery - in a broad variety of genres - which involves Lene Lovich plus, in instrumental compartment, another VDGG alumnus David Jackson on brass and guitarist John Ellis, formerly with THE VIBRATORS and THE STRANGLERS. Of course, idiosyncrasy reigns o'er the proceedings, but it's of a tasty kind with Judge as an arresting rhapsode backed by a fantastic band who bend "Seven Yard Promenade" into a classic sax-oiled rhythm-and-blues piece in Act One and don a death metal group masks in dry metal of Act Two's "Carpet Of Bones", a thematic relative of "Carpet Crawlers", and "Tear Him Asunder" from Act Three. There's even a power ballad here, "Orphic Lullaby", whereas "Orfeas' Audition" rides an orchestra-drench twang. Less seriously, "Wolfman George" parodies a famous riff in swinging fashion of a Zappa canon, "In-Flight Movie" comes on in a disco inferno form, and "The Crab Nebula" glides on lounge electronica - all organic, even the Mediterranean fusion and rap of "Don't Deafen Me, Persephone" or theatricality of Smith and Lovich duets in "Orfeas and Eurydice". An immersive tale that's never boring and bearing a happy end - not to everyone's taste yet daring in its scope and fun to listen to - "Orfeas" might be Judge's best work yet. ****

JUDGE SMITH: excerpts from Orfeas

I know that I keep banging on about it, but its my blog and I'll bang if I want to. Judge Smith's extraordinary new album Orfeas really is worth investigating. One of the things that I am most looking forward to when I finally get my recording set up finished next week is talking to him about it...

JUDGE SMITH: Orfeas lauded en Francais

So it seems that we are not the only people to be massively impressed by Judge Smith's Orfeas album. The following review is from a French wesbite, and is translated by those jolly nice people at Google. We are posting it for several reasons, not the least because the sentiments expressed are very similar to our own; like us he was someone that they had vaguely heard of, and like us the release of Orfeas has turned them into a true fan...

Rating: 7.5/10
His name sounds perhaps like a distant echo in the memory of some. Judge Smith is indeed the co-founder of Van der Graaf Generator with Peter Hammill , although it has left the adventure start 1969 before recording the first 33 laps of this group. Occupied by various musical projects, from design stage performances to composing for other artists, creating an opera of modern music in a TV series and even a film, Judge Smith expects 1991 to produce his first album, a collection of songs written between 1968 and 1977 ("Democrazy") and 1993 for his first original album is finally born ("Dome Of Discovery").

In the 2000s, he moves up a gear than seven CDs released since, one of which, "Curly's Airship", he says is the most ambitious rock album ever produced to date. "Curly's Airship" is also the first Songstory , name that gives a narrative form of music he loves and whose "Orfeas" is the third avatar. The man is complex and analysis of his music proves it. Indeed, "Orfeas" is certainly an ambitious and complex concept. Beyond the argument (revisiting the myth of Orpheus by modernizing, becoming a rock guitarist Orpheus and Eurydice idolized his muse that he will eventually), it is especially the bias of the composition s 'is original. Judge Smith has decided to register by September formations of different musical styles, each being associated with a training style.

We discover, therefore, in order of appearance on the disc, a Greek bard singing so hard on bombastic guitar arpeggios Hispanic, the Orfeas Band, rock band, Judge Smith using his technique of speech music on the soliloquies of Orfeas , a technique also used in interviews complimented with a string sextet, techno music to symbolize the passage from dream to reality of the heroes of classic opera songs way between Orpheas and Eurydice, played by Lene Lovich and finally a group of metal for the tragic end of the story. If the bard who plays the role of narrator is amusing at best, annoying at worst, the string sextet mixing romantic and contemporary music and that there is not much to say about the passages techno and metal very marked in their respective genres, back on the other three sets. Orfeas The Band plays instrumental rock classic, even if an instrument is an accordion relatively discreet. It serves mainly as a backdrop to the two soloists are impeccable as John Ellis and David Jackson . John Ellis (the "hands of Orfeas") treats us gratifying guitar solos and removed. David Jackson shines for her many saxophone in However, a register wiser than he who was in his VDGG . The duets between Judge Smith and Lene Lovitch resemble vocal improvisations: no guidelines really emerges from these "songs", this is a conversation where protagonists are expressed in these notes as in musicals where the music follows the text and not the other.

Finally the six soliloquies and two interviews using an original technique called speech music whereby every inflection of the voice is converted into its equivalent music. The "score" is then created and played by an instrument whose sound is superimposed on the voice, generating an echo phenomenon, all served on a discreet orchestration. The effect is pretty amazing and made ​​the soliloquies are sufficiently short that the surprise did not turn into annoyance. All these styles are intertwined in the album, giving a report to the staff and less chaotic. Unnecessary to consider what was coming off the lot titles, "Orfeas" is an indivisible whole that we appreciate as a whole or rejected as totally.

But creativity, inventiveness, attention to detail, the factual quality of the interpretation are undeniable. All sprinkled with a healthy dose of humor. As for assessing the results, it's just a matter of personal taste.

JUDGE SMITH: Popular in Belgium

There really is somethging magickal about Judge Smith's new album 'Orfeas'. I know that I keep banging on about it, but it really is one of the most magickal pieces of music that I have heard in a long time. Clearly othger people think so too, which is why I am reposting this Belgian review. I have not done any editing on it, because I think that correcting the odd grammatical error would take away some of the wide-eyed charm of the rveiew, which is obviously by someone who loves the record as much as I do...

http://www.keysandchords.com/6/post/2012/03/orfeas-a-songstory-by-judge-smith.html

Orfeas: A Story Song By Judge Smith 18/03/2012
0 Comments

Christopher John Judge Smith is an English composer and co-founder of the band Van der Graaf Generator. Initially he was successful under the name Chris Judge Smith, but ultimately he chose simply Judge Smith. He was the original drummer for Van der Graaf Generator, but when Guy Evans took the drumsticks in hand yet is limited to the vocal parts. After recording the first single "People You Were Going To" Smith decided to drop this project.

Along with saxophonist David Jackson, he formed the band Heebalob. But unfortunately this was also short-lived, zoadat Smith eventually chose solopad. Of the many songs in that period he overwhelming, there are few to excel on his solo debut "Demo Crazy" from 1991. This release was badly crushed in a limited edition and is now a real collectors item. Two years later 'Dome Of Discovery'. The strange thing behind this album is that Smith except the vocals also each note sampled sounds from real instruments arise. In 2000 he completed the double 'Curly's Airship, a project that dealt with the R101 airship disaster in 1930. Eight years we had to wait on 'Long-Range Audio Device'.

On May 9, 2011 appeared than this 'Orfeas', and this is Smith's third straight song story. It is actually an interpretation of the myhte of Orpheus, performed by seven separate ensembles. In addition to Judge Smith granted a lot of famous artists their cooperation. Or how about Gigi Cavalli Cocchi (drums), Dutchman René Commenée (percussion), John 'Fury' Ellis (guitar to include Peter Gabriel, The Stranglers), David Jackson (saxophone), Dorie Jackson (backing vocals), Lene Lovich (vocals), David Minnick (guitar), Ben Nation (cello), Ricardo Odriozola (violin) and Bert Mantilla (accordion). The song story is neatly divided into three acts. Together accounted for 34 tracks or 77 minutes and 42 seconds exactly. Smith eagerly makes use of wild contrasting music is a melting pot of Southern guitars, classical string orchestras, meditative trance sound and metal rock. Some describe it as ethereal pop, though I would seriously consider this term.

Judge Smith is a magical musician who's counting a coherent story. Philip Verhaeghe (3)

JUDGE SMITH: new podcast now online.

Jon Kirkman emailed me a few minutes ago.

"Just so you can do a story about it there is a new Judge Smith Podcast live on the Gonzo website HERE

It is almost an hour long and is Judge in conversation with me and we are also playing tracks from the Orfeas album. There will be two more Judge Smith Podcasts in the next few weeks".

For the record, I am still engaged in a love affair with this extraordinary album, and am very much looking forward to talking to Judge myself, some time soon...

JUDGE SMITH: Dutch Review

CHRIS JUDGE SMITH - Orfeas (2011)

Co-founder of Van der Graaf Generator ...

... made ten albums and now comes with 'Orfeas', a retelling in a modern style of the classic story of Orpheus, the mystical musician to the Land of the Dead travels in search of the lost Eurydice.

The legendary Chris Judge Smith is This "movie for your ears", as the accompanying letter states, including assisted by David Jackson, nice to him after his forced departure from VDGG again to hear, guitarist John Ellis (Peter Gabriel, King Crimson, Stranglers), drummer Gigi Cavaalli Cocchi (Moon Garden, Mangala Vallis) and Lena Lovich (the famous new wave singer).

Smith's love for a combination of song, spoken word and music is here performance exhibited in a 34-piece 'three act-song story'. So there you love but it appeals to me: strong musicianship, excellent production and great songs all take the strong and fairly strong musical interludes, a sort of mixture of death metal, trance, rock and classical music, I sometimes just to short. Smith is also a novelty which he, with a relatively unknown technique, recorded vocals into music and melody. I find it intriguing but it is hard to explain. Listening is the motto.

Orfeas is an excellent and successful attempt of Smith to this wonderful, classic story telling again, wrapped in a fine coat in which musical creativity and humor have found their place. The sleek layout and the book make it down. Harry 'JoJo' de Vries (what a week 11)

JUDGE SMITH: Many layers of the onion

ORFEAS, Part Three
I am still trying to get my head around this record. The more I listen to it the more complex it becomes. One of the most irritating things about much popular music is the wysiwyg sundrome - basically what you see IS what you get, and the thing about artists like Judge Smith is that it is nothing like that.

It works on all sorts of levels. On the surface it is a jolly collection of songs which tells a story with engaging characters.

But it is also a whole collection of different pieces of music in a number of different idioms. It also features Lene Lovich (who is a great and sadly underappreciated singer) and John Ellis, the guitarist from The Vibrators who was one of my inspirations back when I was a spiky haired little herbert just about to be expelled from a not-very-good public school back in the day.

It is also a remarkably complex allegory, which uses a Chorus in the fashion of Greek Classical drama. But it also has drug jokes (one at least).

I am giving it a few more days, and will be listening to it again. Judge, by the way, emailed me yesterday. He seems a jolly good fellow, and I will be interviewing him in the not too distant future, so watch this space dudes and dudettes..

JUDGE SMITH: Speech Music and Allegorical tales

ORFEAS, Part Two

We sat down to listen to it last night, and although I know vaguely what I was expecting, but what we got was nothing like it.

For one thing I didn't expect it to be so enjoyable. I was expecting a piece of heavy Art with a capital A, but what we got was definitely well crafted, artostically valid, yadda yadda yadda, but it was also really entertaining and good fun.

It tells the story of George Orpheus, a rock guitarist of a certain age, whose career is dependent on his artistry on a magickal guitar called Eurydice (which he completely misunderstands, misreading it as "Furry Dice"). It transpires that Eurydice is actually his muse (no, not a three piece rock band from Teignmouth, that would have a capital M, duh!) and the magick guitar was her way of communicating her creative spirit into the engagingly numb skull of George O.

When George O turns his back on his creativity, disaster strikes....

One of the most striking things about the album is the way that Judge Smith uses a singular technique that I had not come across before:

"Speech-music involves taking a recording of a spoken voice, and then setting that recording to music; a music that closely follows the rhythm of the spoken words and the natural rise and fall of the speaker’s voice. This rather demanding and arduous technique was first heard in the 1980s, in the work of a small number ofcomposers and performers, all from the Americas. These include Scott Johnson, Hermeto Pascoal, and Steve Reich, while more recently René Lussier and Charles Spearin have continued to develop the idea. But perhaps the most accomplished speech- music practitioner to have emerged is another American, David Minnick,whom I was lucky enough to involve in the Orfeas project. My own initial experiments in the field can be heard on the 2007 L-RAD album Long Range Audio Device, and my only minor claim to originality in using the technique is that I believe I mightbe the first composer to use 'acted' or deliberately performed speech to generate the music, as opposed to documentary recordings of one kind or another".

JUDGE SMITH: Orfeas (Yer Press Release)

2/29/2012 - London, UK - Independent composer and recording artist Judge Smith, who in 1967 co-founded with Peter Hammill the influential underground band Van der Graaf Generator, has created a movie for your ears – a new concept CD titled 'Orfeas'; a retelling of the ancient myth of Orpheus, the magical musican who travels to the Land of the Dead in search of the lost Eurydice. Since his Van der Graaf Generator days, Judge Smith has been responsible for a wide variety of music projects, including four stage-musicals (with productions at the Edinburgh Traverse, Sheffield Crucible and the Lyric, Hammersmith), opera and cantata libretti, songs for the ‘70s TV show ‘Not The Nine O’clock News’, and songs recorded by Peter Hammill and Lene Lovich. His film ‘The Brass Band’ has won several international awards. Judge Smith's music is complex in structure and often fragmented, but is always tuneful and strangely memorable, with humor never far from the surface. In the course of a twenty-year independent solo career, he has released ten CDs and DVDs.

“My principal interest is in telling stories with words and music,” explains Judge. “Some of my CDs are collections of songs, the usual format for an album, although people say that my songs are unusual and idiosyncratic. However, three of my projects are in a different category. Over many years, I have developed a new way of making extended musical narratives that I call ‘Songstories’, which are more complex than song-cycles or ‘rock operas’. They are not ‘musicals’ either, since they are pretty well un-stageable, and are each intended to be being complete as an ‘audio experience’. The three Songstories are all very different. The first, ‘Curly’s Airships’, a double CD with a running time of two hours and twenty minutes, was completed in 2000 after six years full-time work, and tells the story of the 1930 R-101 Airship disaster. It is probably one the largest and most ambitious pieces of rock music ever recorded. The second, ‘The Climber’, released in 2009, in complete contrast, is performed by me with an unaccompanied Norwegian male voice choir, and a double bass. The third Songstory is ‘Orfeas’, my own interpretation of the Classical myth.”

This Songstory uses wildly contrasting styles of music to tell its story, including instrumental Rock, Mediterranean guitar music, modern classical string sextet music, classical Trance dance music and Death Metal. 'Orfeas' also features a radical, and little-known, technique for transforming recorded speech into melody. “As far as I am aware, I am the only person making work like this, and I think it would be probably fair to say that no one else does what I do,” says Judge.

“Best known for his role in the formation of Van de Graaf Generator, Judge Smith is clearly not an artist with much interest in toeing the line. 'Orfeas', a three-act 'songstory' in which Smith and a host of guest performers re-imagine the titular Greek legend as he headlines at Wembley Arena, is effectively an exercise in schizophrenic musical theatre, replete with rambling soliloquies and plot-revealing dialogue set to avant-garde chamber music, that takes in everything from Jaunty rock radio-jingles and ethereal pop.” Dom Lawson – Classic Rock Presents Prog

In recent news, on November 6, 2011 a performance of Judge Smith's 'The House That Cried' was held in Como, Italy. The show also took place on November 20, 2011 in Chiasso, Switzerland.

For more information visit www.Judge-Smith.com

To purchase Judge Smith – Orfeas CD http://www.gonzomultimedia.co.uk/product_details/15417

Press inquiries: Glass Onyon PR, PH: 828-350-8158, glassonyonpr@cs.com

JUDGE SMITH: In the news

One does try not to be churlish, and the person who did this interview was obviouly impressed by the new album, but - goodness me - there are some massive cock-ups in this generally positive review:

http://www.antimusic.com/news/12/March/08Singled_Out-_Judge_Smiths_Orfeas.shtml

The ever wonderful Lene Lovich, as Eurydice:

JUDGE SMITH - Tell me the old old story

ORFEAS, Part One

I've got a confession to make. I have vaguely heard of Chris Judge Smith over the years, but until this evening I hadn't ever got around to listening to him. And not for the first time in my life, I am cursing the unfortunate omission.

OK, what do you think when you hear that an ex-member of Van der Graaf Generator has made a mildly avant garde concept album based upon the classic story of Orpheus and Eurydice?

(EDITOR'S NOTE: Rock music is often a medium prone to hyperbole, and the word 'classic' is one of the most over used words in the genre. However, when one finds out that the earliest known appearance of the story is in the 6th Century BC, it makes claims that "Robbie Williams has made a 'Classic' album" seem pretty small beer, but I digress - I do that a lot, you'll find)

Still digressing, for those of you who are not familiar with the old old story about how Orpheus lost his wife and went into Hades to find her, you had better check it out HERE)

You know it is going to be classy; you know it is going to be edufite; you know that it is going to be well crafted. But, bloody hell, you don't realise that it is going to be so much fun! Corinna, (my wife), Graham (my best mate) and Prudence (my rather silly bulldog/boxer bitch) sat down to listen to it this evening, and none of us got even slightly what we expected....

To be Continued...