This was a time when a brief blossoming of progressive rock into the commercial rock mainstream had wilted away and the less musically accomplished but allegedly more “authentic” forms of punk and new wave had been adopted by a rising generation of inchoate young rebels. On prog’s avant fringe, Britain’s Henry Cow had parted ways with Virgin Records (which also dumped the likes of Gong, Robert Wyatt, and Hatfield and the North in preference for the Sex Pistols), and Cow drummer Chris Cutler and his bandmates took up the mantle of the Rock in Opposition, a European collective of like-minded avant-proggers, including Belgium’s Univers Zero and Sweden’s Samla Mammas Manna, dedicated to non-commercial musical exploration based in rock and free of corporate-driven market-based demands.

The Rock in Opposition audience was comparatively small (the audience for the first RIO festival at the New London Theatre, Drury Lane, in 1978 reportedly numbered in the hundreds) but some people were paying attention, including Tim Parr way off in the American Southwest. While still in high school, Parr bought albums by Henry Cow, Univers Zero, Samla Mammas Manna, and more, and played them for his friends, who apparently became as enamored of the music as Parr himself. But unlike mere fans, Parr and his buddies decided they could actually play that kind of stuff. And make no mistake, that didn’t mean banging out “Louie, Louie” in the garage, but instead mastering technically accomplished, often quite complex composed and improvised instrumental avant rock that would stretch their abilities and challenge even the most forward-thinking audiences within earshot.

In the mid-‘70s, budding guitarist Parr would gather his musician friends together to record improvisations on his four-track Teac tape deck, and the best parts of the improvisations would form the basis for later performances and recordings by the band, featuring Parr along with cellist Bill Johnston, drummer Bob Stearman, keyboardist Craig Bork, and bassist Tim Lyons. With the group apparently not taking Phoenix by storm, cellist Johnston moved to Olympia, Washington to attend Evergreen State College, and became manager at a campus radio station in 1979. Parr followed Johnston to Olympia and began his own program on the station, where he crossed paths with reedman Joe Halajian, and the two struck up an on-air improvisational collaboration. And given the access Johnston, Parr, and Halajian had to the college’s eight-track recording studio, Stearman, Bork, and Lyons soon arrived from Phoenix to complete the band’s final sextet lineup and put some of its music to tape. With the group christened Knebnagäujie, a name Parr devised and to which the other bandmembers agreed, the sextet -- augmented on one track by flutist Craig Fry from musical compatriots (and Cuneiform label artists) Cartoon and tabla player Warren Ashford -- recorded a demo tape of exceedingly accomplished Rock in Opposition-informed music that, while matching the quality of those RIO bands across the pond, would not see the light of day as a formal album release for decades.

As the ‘70s gave way to the ‘80s, all the bandmembers aside from Johnston returned to Phoenix and continued developing their music, eventually leaving the desert to join Cartoon in San Francisco. They changed the band name to Pocket Orchestra, performed at various Bay Area venues, and recorded another -- arguably even more impressive -- demo tape using a mobile studio in 1983. Shortly thereafter, however, the Knebnagäujie/Pocket Orchestra saga came to a conclusion when Joe Halajian (aka Joe Who) departed for New Jersey to care for his mother. There was subsequent talk among the bandmembers about re-forming, but that would never happen.

Tim Parr -- “the driving force of the band” according to Bork -- died in August 1988, and any thoughts of a Pocket Orchestra reunion died with him. Bassist Tim Lyons died in 1998. Drummer Bob Stearman suffered a stroke in 2004 and died six years later in 2010. In 2005 the now defunct Israel-based MIO Records label issued the Knebnagäujie/Pocket Orchestra demo tapes for the first time on CD in a 500-copy limited edition, including an extensive liner note essay by Cartoon member Scott Brazieal detailing the group’s history as summarized above, from its roots in Phoenix to its final years in San Francisco. After the MIO CD lapsed from print and became unavailable, the Italian AltrOck label reissued the album in 2011 (with remastering by Tel Aviv's Udi Koomran) along with a second disc of live material recorded at venues in California and Phoenix between 1980 and 1984. With this AltrOck release (titled Phoenix), Pocket Orchestra -- a band worthy of joining any of its European inspirations on-stage at a Rock in Opposition festival -- achieved perhaps its largest worldwide audience, but sadly after three of its members, including its “driving force,” had passed on. ~ Dave Lynch