To my mind though, 'Hammond Sounds Relaxing' has crossed a line of sorts - not only do we have a topless woman, on this one there's a bare nipple on display too. Not blatantly in your face I grant you, but it's there all the same, and the fact it is more covert somehow makes it all the worse. Dishonest even, but what makes it worse still is the look of borderline surprise and/or confusion on the woman's face that makes it look like the photographer stumbled across her in a private moment and took a quick snap without her consent. Worser stiller, this isn't a release on some obscure, low budget, moral free label looking to generate all the sales it can - this is EMI, a label who, in just a few years time, would be booting the Sex Pistols off it's roster because "EMI feels it is unable to promote this group's records in view of the adverse publicity generated over the past two months." So, it seems some comedy anarchy is a no no but blatant sexist exploitation is just fine and dandy. The seventies really were another country.
Secondly, I've come to appreciate the fact that the back cover notes that inevitably appear on these releases are often more entertaining than the music itself. Usually taking the form of a gushing hagiography hacking a silk purse out of a sow's ear for all it's worth, the text on the back of 'Hammond Sounds Relaxing' about quartet leader Harry Stoneham is a case in point:
"Harry describes himself as the biggest ligger in the world, by which he means that he is very idle given the chance: if he has nothing to do, he is most likely to do nothing! But he also has a lot of interests outside the world of music, and wishes he had more time for them - bird spotting, reading and building model aircraft. For all his considerable success as a musician, Harry says 'I'm still a frustrated actor at heart. It must be nice to escape from real life sometimes'. The other thing he would really love to be able to do is paint - preferably like Constable"
Well there we are then. You'd never get Van Morrison opening up like that on his albums.
As for the music itself, well 'Hammond Sounds Relaxing's tracklist is wall to wall Tin Pan Alley standards ('Cheek To Cheek', 'Stardust', Begin The Beguine', 'Like Someone In Love' etc.) played by a quarter of fairly renowned (it has to be said) British and Australian jazz musicians. Chris Karan (drums) and Pete Morgan (bass) are no slouches, but unfortunately, the end product is rather less than the sum of its parts, and any shortcomings it has I lay firmly at the feet of Harry Stoneham and his Hammond. Now, I don't have a problem with the Hammond per se, but like bagpipes and kettledrums, it's not high on my list of 'instruments to relax to' which, given the title of this album, presents me with a problem.
Imagine, if you will, 'Kind Of Blue' with Miles Davis' trumpet replaced by a Hammond organ and you'll be nearing the ball park of how this sounds. And not just replaced, but replaced, shoved upfront and mixed far too loud so that it dominates the whole soundscape. I don't know if this was a deliberate ploy by Stoneham just to show whose quartet this is, but its resulted in an album that perhaps would have been more honestly called 'Hammond Does Not Sound Relaxing At All'. Stoneham tries to play with kid gloves, but like a child trying to stage whisper at a funeral that they want to use the toilet, his attempts to dial it down only makes it all the more distracting. I'm afraid all this would have all sat so much better with me if he'd unplugged the thing and let the trio get on with it because, in the gaps between his playing, they sound like they're cooking with gas.
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