Hidden Treasure: Chase
Featured Album
Of all the popular music styles and sub-genres of the late ’60s and early ’70s, “horn rock” is perhaps the only one that hasn’t been revived and revered by subsequent generations.
A perhaps inevitable offshoot of mid-’60s “blue eyed soul” acts like Tom Jones, The Righteous Brothers and Mitch Ryder & the Detroit Wheels, the “horn rock” movement began in earnest in 1967 when Chicago pop group The Buckinghams, under the direction of producer James William Guercio, took brass-heavy hits like “Kind of a Drag,” “Don’t You Care” and “Hey Baby, They’re Playing Our Song” into the U.S. Top 20. Guercio went on to work his brassy magic with Blood, Sweat & Tears and Chicago Transit Authority (later just known as Chicago), establishing a basic “horn rock” template in the process, wherein blustery-voiced frontmen strutted and barked over horn charts that sounded more at home on a college football field than a concert stage. You could practically hear the leisure suits, porn-staches and gold chains.
And yet, despite being almost comically unhip, “horn rock” actually grabbed a respectable market share during the Nixon administration, with brass-powered bands like the Ides of March, Lighthouse, Cold Blood and Tower of Power all charting with records that were clearly influenced by Guercio’s productions. The most intriguing outfit to emerge from the whole “horn rock” scene (and the most talented, at least in terms of sheer instrumental chops) was Chicago jazz-rock ensemble Chase, who released their self-titled debut album in the spring of 1971.
Formed by veteran jazz trumpeter Bill Chase, who’d previously done time with Maynard Ferguson, Stan Kenton and Woody Herman‘s Thundering Herd, Chase the band also featured the trumpet talents of fellow jazz vets Ted Piercefield, Alan Ware and Jerry Van Blair, as well as the propulsive rock rhythm section of Dennis Johnson (bass), Jay Burrid (drums), Phil Porter (keys) and Angel South (guitar). The band’s first and biggest album, Chase contained the smash hit “Get It On.” With its roiling wah-wah groove, a couple of gloriously cascading trumpet breaks, a swaggering performance by lead vocalist Terry Richards – who is so gruffly insistent about his need to “get it on” that you wish he’d just get on with getting it on already, and stop bugging you about it – and a brief quote from Iron Butterfly’s “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,” “Get It On” somehow manages to condense everything that was sublime and ridiculous about “horn rock” into two minutes and 59 seconds. If they’d stopped there, Chase’s place in “horn rock” hall of fame would have still been assured.
Nothing else on Chase’s debut LP was as bracing or winning as “Get It On,” but it’s still a fairly fascinating period piece – and was considered “legit” enough at the time that Down Beat/Village Voice critic Nat Hentoff penned the album’s liner notes. The opening instrumental “Open Up Wide” veers sharply towards the jazz end of the jazz-rock spectrum, blasting out of the gate like a meth-crazed version of one of Dizzy Gillespie‘s Afro-Cuban combos from the late 1940s. Vocal numbers “Livin ‘In Heat” and “Hello Groceries” keep up the manic, horn-stoked pace, before down-shifting slightly for an unnecessarily overblown version of Mike D’Abo’s oft-covered “Handbags and Gladrags.” “Boys and Girls Together,” which could easily be an outtake from one of the first three Chicago albums, is most notable for being penned by Jim Peterik, leader of fellow Windy City horn-rockers the Ides of March. The album closes with the five-part, 14-minute “Invitation to a River,” a horn-prog epic of jaw-dropping proportions that showcases the stellar musicianship of the band’s four hornmen, even as it beggars belief.
Chase peaked at No. 22 on the Billboard charts, and earned the band a Grammy nomination for Best New Artist. Ennea, the band’s 1972 follow-up, was less successful – climbing only as far No. 71 – probably because it didn’t contain anything nearly as compelling as “Get It On.” “So Many People,” a lesser composition from the then-hot songwriting team of Paul Williams and Roger Nichols, was released as a single but failed to chart. Terry Richards left the band shortly after that track was recorded; his replacement G.G. Shinn, a dead vocal ringer for BS&T’s David Clayton-Thomas, was placed in the unenviable position of having to front the six-part, Greek mythology-based prog-jazz suite that spanned the album’s second side. As with the aforementioned “Invitation to a River,” the playing here is impeccable – just not impeccable enough to save the pretentious concept and ponderous compositions.
Ennea‘s poor commercial reception caused the Chase lineup to splinter; by the time the band returned in early 1974 with Pure Music, Bill Chase was the only original member left. There were no extended, side-spanning suites this time out, just six good-to-great tracks that mostly showed the band heading deeper into contemporary jazz territory. Though they weren’t entirely ready to shake their pop ambitions – “Run Back To Mama” and “Love Is On The Way” were both penned and sung by Peterik, who had left the Ides of March in 1973 – the album’s standout cuts are the four instrumentals: the fusion workout “Weird Song No. 1,” the funky “Close Up Tight,” the cinematic “Bochawa” and the gorgeous, meditative “Twinkles.” Their best album (and the one that sounds least dated today), Pure Music pointed to a bright creative future for Chase, even as “horn rock” was on its way out.
Unfortunately, that future never came to pass. On August 9, 1974, Bill Chase, keyboardist Wally Yohn, drummer Walter Clark and guitarist John Emma died in a plane crash en route to a performance at a county fair in Jackson, Minnesota. But somewhere in Horn Rock Valhalla, Chase are eternally getting it on.
