Terry Riley: The Columbia Recordings
Sony Classical

The reissue of Terry Riley's Columbia recordings in a handsome four-disc box set invites a new appreciation of the hugely influential work the American visionary (b. 1935) produced between 1968 and 1980. Included with the landmark In C are A Rainbow in Curved Air, Church of Anthrax (his John Cale collaboration), and Shri Camel, each significant and rewarding in its own right. It's no exaggeration to say that In C in particular exerted a profound and irrevocable impact on the direction contemporary music took after its release, not to mention the pivotal part it played in the emergence of classical minimalism. Enhancing the box set is a fifty-page booklet containing archival photographs, reprints of essays and notes from the original vinyl releases, and texts by former Sony Masterworks executive Tom Laskey, David Behrman, the original producer of In C and A Rainbow in Curved Air, and Thomas M. Welsh, Riley's longtime manager and archivist. The background details and historical context the texts provide are fascinating and considerably enhance one's appreciation for the works involved and the contexts out of which they arose.

Listening to In C is to this day a thrilling and visceral experience, and the passing of fifty-seven years hasn't lessened its immediacy and appeal. Key to its genius (as well as its enduring quality) is the simplicity of its design: composed in San Francisco in 1964, the score asks each ensemble member to execute fifty-three treble clef phrases, most of them short, in sync with a piano pulse of even octave eighth notes played steadily on the keyboard's top two Cs; advancing in sequence from one figure to the next, each member (except the pianist, of course) determines independently when to move from one phrase to the next. The performance is complete when all of the players have arrived at the fifty-third figure. With such built-in flexibility in place, a rendition can feature any number of participants and last anywhere from forty to ninety minutes. With the piano pulsing throughout and the instrument groupings assembling, dissolving, and re-assembling, the music induces a trance-like state in the listener who's exhilarated and buoyed by the shimmering panorama of sound. In this mesmerizing performance, waves of woodwinds and horns continually advance and recede, while mallet instruments and piano maintain an unrelenting and unwavering pulse.

Adding to the impact of the recording is awareness of the fact that it's a live document of real musicians creating together, in this case Riley on saxophone, Margaret Hassell piano, David Shostac flute, Lawrence Singer oboe, Jerry Kirkbride clarinet, Darlene Reynard bassoon, Jon Hassell trumpet, Stuart Dempster trombone, David Rosenboom viola, Edward Burnham vibraphone, and Jan Williams marimba. As totally live as it sounds, however, a bit of sleight-at-hand was involved in the realization of the final product, as the forty-two-minute recording was built up in three layers, with two added to the performance (ten musicians in the first and seven in the second) by the eleven-member ensemble. As a result, the material as presented features an ensemble of three sets of vibraphones, saxophones, trombones, violas, flutes, oboes, and trumpets, two sets of bassoons, marimbas, and clarinets, and piano. The primary first layer was captured on April 29th, 1968 at Columbia 30th Street Studio in NYC, while the others were added on May 1st and 2nd.

Stylistically, the piece transcends genre in reflecting the influence of classical, jazz, and Indian forms, and is unusual for being both disarmingly accessible and uncompromising experimental. Exuberant, blustery, and propulsive, the music engulfs the listener with its kaleidoscopic design and the omnipresent tension between its static and ever-changing qualities. In contrast to the thunderous drones produced by La Monte Young's Theatre of Eternal Music, the dense wall-of-sound generated by Riley's In C ensemble entrances and enraptures; reactions to the work upon the album's release were predictably mixed, but its historical importance is undeniable.

A considerable left turn was taken for the follow-up. In place of a pulsating ensemble, the two long pieces on A Rainbow in Curved Air were performed by Riley alone, with the album released a year later and like the earlier one produced by Behrman. The layering approach used on In C to augment the live performance was taken to a further degree for A Rainbow in Curved Air, with Riley using tape delay, double-speed tape playback, and overdubbing to generate the recordings. To create the nineteen-minute A Rainbow in Curved Air, he used electric organ, electric harpsichord, rocksichord, dumbec, and tambourine, while the twenty-two-minute Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band features soprano saxophone and electric organ (a cheeky bonus is included by way of a one-minute radio advert). One of the more refreshing things about Riley is his lack of pretension and sense of humour, which are both seen in the Poppy Nogood title and the front cover montage by John Berg that shows Riley's beaming face in the sky. Adding to the trippy vibe, a poem by him appears on the album cover's back side that lays out his utopian vision of a blissful future for humanity and the planet ("And then all wars ended / Arms of every kind were outlawed and the masses gladly contributed them to giant foundries in which they were melted down and the metal poured back into the earth / The Pentagon was turned on its side and painted purple, yellow & green …”).

Recorded at NYC's Columbia Studio B, the title track draws the listener in quickly with layers of looping organ patterns, synth-like flutter, and throbbing percussion that blend into a phantasmagoric whole (listeners familiar with the recordings of LA-based composer Michael Robinson might be startled by how similar Riley's keyboard timbres are to the ones Robinson produces with his Meruvina). The absence of downbeats bolsters the music's impression of flow, while his use of non-tempered tuning likewise amplifies the music's hypnotic character. Unfolding at rapid speed, the music dazzles as it cuts a high-intensity path through an ever-mutating jungle of sound. Less frenetic in its pacing is Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band, which blossoms slowly yet forcefully into a vibrant, senses-addling swirl of tape-edited and overdubbed soprano saxes and organs. The music wails ecstatically as bundles of saxophones bleat and roar in some modern-day simulation of a Dionysian dance ritual.

As Riley was working at a 52nd Street studio on A Rainbow in Curved Air, he was also working at a 30th Street studio on a set of songs with the Welsh multi-instrumentalist and songwriter John Cale (the two became acquainted through their association with La Monte Young). Yet while production for the two long pieces on A Rainbow in Curved Air developed without incident, the sessions with Cale did not go as swimmingly. Legend has it Riley arrived at the studio one day to discover Cale covering his organ tracks with guitar and even subsequently removing them from the final mix. It doesn't surprise that Church of Anthrax is the least Riley-like album in the set and that it's more in a conventional rock vein than the other three.

Riley is, however, credited as co-writer with Cale on four of the five songs, with lyrics and music for the fifth, “The Soul of Patrick Lee,“ by Cale alone. He plays bass, harpsichord, piano, guitar, viola, and organ, Riley piano, organ, and soprano saxophone. Adam Miller guests on “The Soul of Patrick Lee“ and contributes a decent if somewhat bland lead vocal (Cale, possessing a voice with far greater character and personality, would have been the better choice), and an credited drummer (identified by one credible source as David Rosenboom, the viola player on In C) gives the rollicking piano romp “Ides of March” muscular punch. In select moments, the music is, admittedly, visionary in the way it anticipates later developments. The bass-thudding groove that introduces the ecstatic title track sounds like a forerunner of Eno's Here Come the Warm Jets while its wild organ soloing could pass for an instrumental break from one of The Doors' psychedelic jams; with the music roaring at full tilt, “Church of Anthrax” also echoes the space voodoo music of Miles Davis's early ‘70s live sets. Less volcanic by comparison are “The Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles,” which couples Cale's piano with the free-form musings of Riley's soprano sax choir, and “The Soul of Patrick Lee,” a three-minute foray into bluesy folk-pop whose words one could imagine Nick Drake singing.

While The Who's Pete Townshend regarded the convergence of rock and the avant-garde signified by Church of Anthrax as a watershed moment (so captivated was he by Riley's work that he conflated his and the name of Townshend's guru Meher Baba into the song title “Baba O'Riley”), Riley himself was less enamoured of the project; in fact, on the day of its release in February 1971, he was 7500 miles away in Delhi and newly focused on learning the vocal tradition of the Kirana gharana—pop music the furthest thing from his mind, seemingly. Whatever its flaws, Church of Anthrax is nevertheless a fascinating document of a one-time collaboration between two naturally inclined provocateurs.

Riley's contract with Columbia ended in 1972, but when it was discovered four years later that he still owed the company an album he agreed to record new material at Columbia's CBS Studios in San Francisco, Shri Camel the result (though it was recorded in 1977 and the master delivered later that year, it wasn't released until 1980). The material's a natural outgrowth of the music Riley was then making, long solo organ explorations that delved into extended improvisation and alternate tuning systems. While the music on Shri Camel came to fruition in the mid-‘70s, its true origin can be traced to years earlier when Riley initiated his study of North Indian raga singing and studied with raga master Pandit Pran Nath. In a 1981 DownBeat feature, Riley revealed that he hadn't written down a single note of music in a decade as he was then deriving inspiration from music born in the moment (it's also worth noting that albums by Riley had appeared between the Cale collaboration and Shri Camel on other labels, among them Happy Ending and Persian Surgery Dervishes).

All four pieces were performed live on a Yamaha YC-45-D electronic organ tuned in just intonation, a choice that allowed for pitches that sounded unusual to ears accustomed to the equal tempered system used in the Western world. Another key component was the application of a digital delay system that enabled Terry to execute duets and trios with the solo part. Overdubbing was used extensively as with now sixteen tracks at his disposal Riley was able to present a huge number of organ voices in a single recording (on Desert of Ice there are apparently sixteen separate organ voices interacting at once). As spontaneous as the performances sound, a great deal of time went into the recording process, with Riley using all of the 100 hours of studio time Columbia granted to him.

The moment Anthem of the Trinity opens the album, the ear is tickled by the arresting sound of just intonation, not to mention the sparkling timbres Riley generates from the Yamaha organ. With the emergence of a repeating, mantra-like figure, the music begins to emit an hypnotic glow and exerts its seductive pull. Timbral contrasts between the layered organs allows for clear separation as the piece unfolds in slow and steady motion. There's an almost child-like innocence and playfulness to the incessantly babbling and burbling Celestial Valley that makes the music all the more endearing. Across the Lake of the Ancient World begins in a reflective and serene mode before repeatedly blossoming into glimmering arrays. It's fascinating to discover how quickly the ear adjusts to the tuning system; by the time the dynamic closing piece, the endlessly percolating Desert of Ice, arrives, habituation has completely set in.

August 2025