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Mindbender album cover (left) and the photo of David Flack that
appeared on the back of the jacket (right; the scratched
scan taken from a well-worn copy of the album)
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In 1970, Sonobeat
began work with San Antonio native David Flack, whose trio performed
as The David Flack Quorum. The resulting album, Mindbender,
was released years after it was recorded. The first few tracks
of the album were recorded at Sonobeat's Western Hills Drive
studio in northwest Austin in summer
'70. The album -- which fused the jazz and classical genres --
was completed in stages over the following three years, in part
because of the disruptive move of Sonobeat's studio
to the KVET building on North Lamar in Austin, David's departure
for service in the Army in 1971, and an extended search for a
vocalist who, as David Flack recalls, "could sing against
the 'soundtrack' already in the can."
Rim Kelley
(Bill Josey
Jr.) engineered the Western Hills Drive sessions before moving
to Houston in fall '70, at which time Bill Josey Sr. took over
engineering as well as
producing
duties. The majority of the album was recorded and mixed at the
Sonobeat studios in the KVET building on North Lamar in Austin.
When David returned in '73
from a 2-year tour of duty in the Army, he and Bill Sr. reconnected,
and Bill Sr. began
offering
the
album
to
national
labels.
Eventually, Liberty/UA
Records in Hollywood, with which Sonobeat had
an established
relationship
through
the Johnny
Winter and Afro-Caravan albums,
expressed interest in the album for its UA and Blue Note labels,
but Bill Sr.'s battle with cancer
-- diagnosed in 1975 -- interfered with putting
a deal together. Eventually, David designed the album jacket
and financed the album's
regional
release. Mindbender was
finally released early in '76, after a long and oft-interrupted
journey. Notably, this was Sonobeat's only commercial release
on which its stylized logo (in the ribbon-like Stiletto font)
did not appear.
The DFQ was David
Flack (electric and acoustic keyboards), Hugh Sparks (acoustic
bass), and Emory Alford (percussion). Marva Jackson provided
vocals. All songs were written by David Flack. Side 1 of the
album, initially themed under the subtitle Scatter
Power,
features six diverse pieces, including Marva's terrific scat
on Chas'er and
David's moody piano on So-Lo; side 2 features the Mindbender
Suite,
consisting of seven interlinked movements presented without breaks.
The liner notes aptly summarize the album's appeal: "Conceptual
in approach and communicative by design, MINDBENDER has that
rare quality of freshness and timelessness ... DFQ has sterling
improvisational ability with clever interplay techniques: The
music is engaging, demanding, and fun!" And here are
four hot sound bites from the album to prove how imaginative the
DFQ's material was. We've remixed these sound bites from the original
4-track master tapes for clarity; we hope you'll enjoy Marva's
vocal performance of Once I Dreamed (which was listed
on the master tape box under the title Inside It), So
What??, and Taste of Time as
much as we do and will get a kick out of David's keyboard pyrotechnics
and Marva's cool scat on Chas'er.
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