Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, here I am, stuck in the middle with Shadowfax’s The Dreams Of Children. Clearly, a dividing line between their more celebrated/known early work as Windham Hill darlings of jazz/fusion and their later work as ultra-smooth New Age group, The Dreams of Children (seems to me) occupies a misunderstood stroke of brilliance…that just happened to land on Windham Hill’s steps. Calling it: “milquetoast, pseudo-Fourth World music meeting delicate, sleepytime New Age electronics, in a way that isn’t too terribly experimental or terribly too commercial” would feel like damning it with faint praise, when its really an album full of tracks that softly sticks with you for all of those reasons. Edges all smoothed out, it’s a shining example of peak Windham Hill New Age.
My first introduction to Shadowfax came via their label’s Windham Hill Records Sampler ’86, one of the many Windham Hill compilations of mood music from their label. I’d heard the A-side of this sampler and by then I had found very little engaging in what I’ve heard. Other than Mike Marshall and Darol Anger’s gorgeous “Dolphins” a very William Ackerman-like bit of lilting, ambient Americana, nothing else on that album had moved my pulse much.
Flipping over, to what I’d discover would be the much more interesting side. First, I heard an ear perking bit of something that sounded very little like New Age. “Another Country” from Shadowfax with its electro-acoustic bits of Afro Pop esoterica and kind of weird bass heavy mix, sounded like something Don Cherry would have put out himself under some pseudonym. Like some halfway point between dance music and Philip Glass-like minimalism, it just plain sounded unlike anything of what Windham Hill should be known for. In hindsight, now it made perfect sense that the next track to follow on the sampler would be Interior’s own masterwork of Japanese New Age “Hot Beach”. What else could precede a track like that, but another one so out of step with everything around it?
Led by Lyricon wind synthesizer master Chuck Greenberg and guitarist G. E. Stinson, Shadowfax originally began as a fusion group that transitioned itself out of Jazz altogether with oodles upon oodles of reviewers bemoaning that fact, littering various web 1.0 music boards. Many couldn’t (and I imagine, still can’t)stomach this group toning down the uber technical wankery of their past, into what sounded like a cash grab of smooth, very Peter Gabriel-esque, WOMAD-lite music. It’s these times that I’m thankful a younger generation, self included, can retrain our bias and actually appreciate the worthy leap into something else Shadowfax made.
Is The Dreams of Children a perfect collection of music? Hell no. There will be times when the zeal of Chuck trying to play something (perhaps a sax?) on nearly everything, could now (in hindsight) be seen as a bad idea — ruining perfectly good songs with something deeply dated and incompatico. However, there will be times when really weird or different ideas rear their head and no amount of descriptors could accurately capture how contemporary their take on “New Age” remains. It may not sound as moody or complex as their prior release, Shadowdance (one still well worth anyone’s time), which broke them into the burgeoning New Age market, but The Dreams of Children has certain tracks (and a certain mood) that you can use to forgive some sins, wash away their name, their label, and in the end, the band itself, and perfectly slot them into a left-field dance or “chillout” playlist context — one, that’d make people come up to you pleading for a track id. But why would one want to do that?
Finding inspiration from Don Cherry’s very “Oriental”-influenced ethno spiritual jazz, think Brown Rice which they covered themselves, Shadowfax saw to introduce less acoustic instrumentation and more askew, synthetic motifs into their music. Trying to use various sonic effects and deliberate machine rhythms with their more polyrhythmic technique, I think, is where their freeform mannerism finally clique — at least for me. How else can you explain the draw of “Another Country”?
Once again, we begin here, the trade off from the warmthness of prior recordings comes in the more meticulous space provided by more digital sounds. Not being able to overwhelm you with dexterous flash forced the Shadowfax boys to focus primarily on making compelling melodies and stoking a fascinating bit of atmosphere (when needed). In the mind of less able groups, the angular electro-acoustic minimalism groove of that track would falter when the Lyricon makes its pan flute-like siren call, but here the group manages to remain focused in keeping that musical trance alive, and saving that last dance for others. It’s the same kind of focus that rescues other tracks like “Word From the Village” and really empowers others like “Shaman Song” from sounding like dreaded background music. Simply listen to the twisty interplay of berimbau, Moog Memorymoog, and violin on the latter, then tell me it’s not something that’s immediate and interesting.
The quieter, or more stereotypical, New Age tracks present their own engaging sense of easygoing experimentation. “The Big Song” pairs its Frippertronic-lite ambient voyage into a much more interesting bit of push-pull, concise twinkly, floating music. The titular track strips to a very Western essence the sunstained, starlit feel of the prior song, and transforms it into something that Inoyama Land would have conspicuously released themselves. At least now, if I believe your history, those cascading bits of precious DX7 shouldn’t be something you’d be afraid of.
I’ll end this exposition on a personal highlight of mine: “Kindred Spirits”. Sorely dated in sound and feel, nothing of its fake electronic balladry should appeal to me. However, there’s just something about these swelling bits of fakeness meeting the slippery bass work of Phil Maggini that still gets to me. Tasteful and harmonious, it’s a clue into this group maximizing what they had, with the applied knowledge that they had. ECM-lite as it is, it’s deriving the ECM-ness from some of label’s most totemic bits to make their own bit of memorability.
I don’t know, I mean, in the end, who doesn’t have time to make room for music that can still draw you in with truly interesting shapes and colors that one wouldn’t normally gravitate to? Good taste never lies.