Jazz
Hermeticum Records · 8 July 2026
Dave Brubeck’s “Blue Rondo a la Turk” played on marimba, with no keyboard anywhere and the 9/8 split between the bars and the cymbal: six minutes and twenty-five seconds at the centre of a twenty-three-minute EP. Around it sit Luiz Bonfá’s theme for “Black Orpheus”, Vince Guaraldi’s “Linus and Lucy” and a fourth piece, “I Showed Them”, close to eight minutes and the only one where Ed Macan puts down the marimba for the vibraphone.
The tapes date from March 1996, at Ozone Studios in Eureka, California, with Xeff Scolari engineering, and they were cut in one take with no editing: Macan’s trio, with Donald “Donnie Joe” Sweeney on bass guitar and Michael Morris on drums, wanted them as a calling card to get bookings in the jazz clubs of California’s north coast. Hermetic Science had been founded that January as a marimba and vibraphone trio, an instrumentation no other progressive rock band has, and spent the spring of 1996 and the summer of 1997 finishing their first album, “Ed Macan’s Hermetic Science”, released in November 1997. Somewhere in that work the four jazz tapes dropped out of sight. They came back this spring, when Macan — a musicologist away from the band, and the author of “Rocking the Classics”, the study of English progressive rock that Oxford published in 1997 — went looking for the original ADATs to remaster that debut for its thirtieth anniversary.
The result is clean and the ensemble sound is warm, but the mix gives away what this was for: the drums sit above the bass and the vibes, and in a trio where the harmonic weight is carried by struck bars, the cymbals eat the midrange. The other thing worth saying is what isn’t here. Not a note of the band’s own writing: anyone who comes to Hermetic Science for the chamber-and-psychedelia fusion of the last thirty years will find a trio playing standards to get work, which is literally what the session was for. Of the four pieces, Macan reckons two were never played live at all.
Rating: 6.8/10
Text by Aina Torrents