Soft Machine's revolving door of personnel changes continued with 1973's Seven, the last Softs album with a numbered title and also the last released by Columbia. Bassist Hugh Hopper was gone, replaced by Roy Babbington, a guest musician on 1971's Fourth who had played bass with Nucleus. Two other Nucleus alumni, keyboardist/reedman Karl Jenkins and drummer John Marshall, were on board as well, and since keyboardist/composer Mike Ratledge was now the band's only founding member (actually, Hopper wasn't an original member either, having replaced Kevin Ayers for Volume Two), the group's links to their early years seemed increasingly tenuous -- and would become more so. Yet when Jenkins had joined the group prior to Six, following the departure of saxophonist Elton Dean, he seemed to bring an intuitive grasp of how Soft Machine could continue moving forward in the band's jazz-rock years while retaining touchstones to the past. A less assertive saxophonist than Dean, Jenkins played multiple reeds but didn't really match Dean as an improviser; his main contributions in the future would be as keyboardist and composer in the ever-evolving Soft Machine style of jazz-rock. And on Seven, he penned seven of the album's 12 tracks, beginning to assume the band leadership role that Ratledge -- who composed four tracks -- shied away from. With Jenkins edging closer to the band's creative center, the Softs forged ahead with their riff- and ostinato-based music, keyboard and reed melodies intersecting at unexpected angles with streamlined yet often odd-metered bass and drums, all flowing forward with muted, spacy sonorities and sometimes hypnotic repetition (and, of course, bridges or codas of echoing keyboard loops).

1		Nettle Bed
2		Carol Ann
3		Day's Eye
4		Bone Fire
5		Tarabos
6		D.I.S.
7		Snodland
8		Penny Hitch
9		Block
10		Down The Road
11		The German Lesson
12		The French Lesson

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