Sword & Sandals- Good & Plenty

 

When the Bent Arcana album was announced in June 2020, John Dwyer's accompanying press blurb gave us this explanation: “[t]his is the first interstellar transmission from five days of electrified & improvised sessions recorded at Stu-Stu-Studio, edited down to 40 minutes for your earballs.” It didn't come as much of a shock, given that the most recent Osees album at this time was Face Stabber, a monolithic beast that ends with a 21 minute psych-jazz jam. The band had also for some years used soloing and group improvisation during live shows. So, yeah, what could be a more natural progression than Dwyer calling up a few musician friends and having a good old jam session? This was something that rock-associated musicians had been doing since at least Al Kooper's legendary 1968 Super Session, a record that saw the assembled players stretching out on blues and jazz jams interspersed with more traditional vocal-led songs. Culled from two days of jamming, Super Session is believed to not only have helped coin the term supergroup but it also called to mind already existing supergroups like Cream and John Mayall & The Bluesbreakers. It's not too much of a stretch to say subsequent supergroups like Blind Faith, The New Yardbirds (soon known as Led Zeppelin), and Emerson, Lake & Palmer were inspired by it to push pure musicianship above pop songforms.

Anyway, no one has claimed Bent Arcana and subsequent improv releases were supergroups, so let's reel it back in. That's not the incongruity here regardless. The real problem with the press blurb above? It wasn't techincally Dwyer's first crack at an improvisation heavy sideproject. That would be Sword & Sandals, a free-jazz band that dates to circa 2006, which you can see in a rare live video from when they were a duo consisting only of John Dwyer on drums and Randy Lee Sutherland on saxophone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WaI6w0H4VJw&ab_channel=KevinBrown

It wouldn't be until 2010 that Sword & Sandals were fully formed and released a studio album, Good & Plenty. Recorded and released during the same time period that gave us Warm Slime, which was not improvised but was recorded live-to-tape, this record of seven untitled songs featured a trio of John Dwyer (drums, flute, and bass), Randy Lee Sutherland (drums, bass clarinet, and alto saxophone), and Shaun O'Dell (tenor/alto saxophones and piano/keyboards); Anthony Petrovic contributes synth on the first track. It's worth noting for Sees-storians that O'Dell did all or some of the artwork for the first OCS album as well as for Good & Plenty. He maintains a personal website to this day and seems to be focused on visual art as well as being a college lecturer/professor. (Aside from Dwyer the other members have remained below the radar)

There are a few bootleg live performances floating around and CD-r/live releases from Sword & Sandals, but it's really hard to pin these down given their obscurity/rarity and the fact that the group's name is also a subgenre of films, thus making them kind of un-Google-able. There's also apparently some even more obscure Irish(?) band going by the name Sword And Sandals to confuse you further. Only the Rate Your Music website lists anything by Dwyer's Sword & Sandals other than the Good & Plenty studio album so tread carefully, hardcore collectors. As a result, it's all I'll be tackling.

Free-jazz is always a tough subject to write about, largely because it's so hard to define. Some people use it interchangeably with the terms free-improv and/or avant-garde jazz, so that even after reading a well written essay like Dom Minasi's Free Jazz Versus Free Improvisation (https://www.allaboutjazz.com/free-jazz-versus-free-improvisation-dom-minasi-by-dom-minasi), I'm still not sure I have a full grasp of the differences. Certainly as a jazz fan I've delved into the waters of landmarks like Out To Lunch (which I absolutely adore, and I believe is considered more avant-garde jazz with free elements) and Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation (which I still find just as baffling as the jazz magazine DownBeat, which after its initial release rated it five stars and no stars in two dueling reviews). All I will say with my dubious-authority on the subject is that I find it a bit elitist when people seem to believe it's only genuine free-jazz if it's performed by musicians who come from a traditional knowledge pool of their instrument and 'classic' jazz/blues forms/modes/scales/chord changes, and also because it still has some “form” and still, occasionally, “swings”...whereas free-improv pretenders do not possess this knowledge and don't have a true feel for “swinging.” Since we know with certainty John Dwyer does not come from a traditional jazz background, make of all this what you will. But I digress.

To these ears, what Sword & Sandals are doing draws more from the John Coltrane school of free-jazz, focusing more on the interaction between 'melodic' instruments freely improvising with a drummer pounding out scattershot rhythms. Though released after his death and therefore not part of his true canon, Interstellar Space, featuring Coltrane playing in a duo with Rashied Ali on drums, is a close touchstone for Good & Plenty. I've always been entranced by Interstellar Space; it's such an oddly beguiling and spectral album, exploring the chaos of the cosmos yet keeping one foot firmly planted in the terra-firma language of mid-to-late 60s jazz. The way each song begins with Coltrane shaking what sounds like sleighbells before Ali begins the space ritual is so distinct yet so simple. While it's obvious Dwyer, O'Dell, and Sutherland are not on the same level as Coltrane—shit, I mean, who is?—there's still a lot of ragtag fun to be had here, skilled amateurs getting in the ring to try to see how many rounds they can bleat, blare, and carom around before collapsing.

Good & Plenty was clearly something done as a vacation for Dwyer, allowing him to take a breather from leading one of the greatest garage-rock bands at the peak of the late 00s/early 2010s garage/psych revival. The obvious point of interest for Osees fans is his turns as drummer, something he's only done on Castlemania and Putrifiers II, but I also want to take the time to call attention to his flute playing, as subtle as it can be in something like the mix in the intro of 'Track 6.' Anyway, since the liner notes don't say which songs he's drumming on, we can't know for sure which bits are his, but I have to say he's actually doing a great job at mimicking what he's aiming for, even if it is a bit more stiff and bass-drum heavy than your usual 'true' jazz drummer. Also worth praising is guest Petrovic's synth during the first track, which is less like free-jazz and much more like the propulsive menace of doomed keyboards on Suicide's first album, in particular 'Ghost Rider.' This is all very interesting given that about ten years later Dwyer would get the itch to again revisit jazz/improv-heavy music, and these kind of instrumental textures would no longer feel quite as out-of-the-blue as they must have to then-Thee Oh Sees fans of Help and Warm Slime. In fact I'd wager that beyond the generally saxophone-dominant sound of Good & Plenty, you could easily put something like the last few minutes of 'Track 2', with its breakdown into smoky atmospherics of keyboard, piano, and bass around the five minute mark, onto side two of the Witch Egg or Gong Splat releases and nobody would notice. Of course then there's freakouts like the short 'Track 4', which is actually quite more familial to the free-jazz leaning moments of a certain replica of the trout mask variety. 'Track 6' is probably my personal favorite, starting out with droning, interwoven saxophone lines and cymbal washes with occasional bass drum pulsebeats before drum rolls begin to churn the ocean around you.

Assuming you come to this record from a jazz/free-jazz knowledge base, I would assume Good & Plenty will strike you as a bit amateur if inoffensive. As for Dwyerologists, unless Endless Garbage is your free-jazz-cup-of-tea, it isn't going to be some hidden gem revelation. Yet even those of you who can't enjoy this racket will find in it a crucial part of Dwyer's musical DNA, an artifact from an earlier time when Thee Oh Sees had only been around about as long as the earlier OCS incarnation had been. It's perhaps more useful to you, then, as a source to cite for the lead-up to the modern jam/improv sideprojects. For those of us who, to use a Grateful Dead metaphor, like our 'Eyes Of The World' as much as we do our 'Drums' and 'Space', Good & Plenty is an intriguing mid-period outlet for Dwyer's more out (in the jazz sense of the word) and outre musical excursions. It's a tantalizing “what if?” to imagine how Sword & Sandals might've developed if he had kept it going concurrently to his main band.