Bertland
The musical universe of Bert Jackson

Another tune that grew out of Jean Coyne’s Roland D-50 keyboard’s extended visit to my house. Started playing around with some stuff and this quasi-classical thing came out. Remember, this was 1987-88 and we had never heard sampled audio patches before. The horn sounds just blew me away. This is all me, all synth recorded on a few tracks.

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This is one of the last iterations of Razor’s Edge in the 80s, with Mike Lurie on bass and Patrick Whatule on drums (Patrick was later replaced by the late great Charles Lynch). This was from a gig we did at the Stouffer Grand Resort in Smith Bay on St. Thomas. The room acoustics were great, as I am pretty sure it was recorded with the internal mic of my cheesy little Hitachi boom box.

Minor Mystery is a Ray Brown tune that I have only heard on Poll Winners Three with Barney Kessel, Brown and Shelley Mann.

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I always loved the sound of this. It was recorded with my cheapo Conrad acoustic guitar with both a mic and a soundhole pickup. The flute sound is from my Roland guitar synth with MKS-50 module, pretty basic. And lots of reverb and delay everywhere. Wall of sound. Phil Spector, eat your heart out. I am eager to record this again with my new Martin.

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This song started out as an acoustic shuffle in 1980, then one day I was inspired to rock it up a bit. This is the result. It predates my Roland drum machine so I think the drums came from one of those cheesy little keyboards. The bass line was probably played on that keyboard as well. It’s all me.

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This is a little rocker I wrote in 1987. Not my usual style but it was fun. I think I’d been listening to some punkish stuff with some of my music pals. Something stuck. Note the odd meter in the bridge! I play everything and programmed the Roland drum machine.

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This is a piece recorded back in the late 80s. My pal, Jean Coyne, had just acquired a new Roland D-50 keyboard synth. It was the first digital synth any of us had tried. And for a while, it stayed with me at my house. So one day I started messing around and pretty soon I was laying down some tracks. My buddy Jake came by and liked what I was doing so he went off in the other room, wrote out lyrics and came back and recorded them. I added a flanged/distorted guitar solo and voila! we were done.

What you hear is a Roland drum machine, me on the D-50 multitracked a few times, including the bass line, Jako on vocals and me on guitar. Very different from most of the stuff we were doing at that time…

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This was the band back in the day- Patrick Whatoule on drums, Earl the Pearl Shuster on bass, Jake the Snake Myer on keys (he had a very cool Roland Juno 80) and me playing the same old Ibanez GB10. Taken at the gazebo in Emancipation Park, St. Thomas.

OK, can’t resist. Here’s a clip from that era. This was Take Me to the Movies, written by Jake and Earl, featuring full on manic Bert guitar and Miles of the 70s trumpet lines by Calvin Dallas. Recorded at Barnacle Bills Limelight Monday sometime in 1986. We called ourselves Cinema that night. As host Morgan Whalen said, “kind of a fusion rock thing with a little Hughie Masakela thrown in.”

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