"Minstrel in the Gallery": it was September 5, 1975

On September 5, 1975, the album "Minstrel in the Gallery" was released, a great work by Jethro Tull.

Wazza

Almost every work by Jethro Tull, from the first appearance, became the epicenter of diatribes raised by a perennially controversial critics, eager to brand the band as belonging or not to the prog current tout court: anxieties that Ian Anderson did not take long to appease, from album to album, escaping the rigid and sterile labels, musically reiterating how Jethro Tull were a reality in their own right,  original in the very personal fusion of different genres, from classical to folk, from hardrock to prog to jazz. A clarification that materialized in a sound and a peculiar style that can be ascribed to themselves alone.

And those who had mercilessly and prematurely destined them, after the success of "Thick as a brick", to an "aura mediocritas" were wrong: it was "Minstrel in the Gallery" that dispelled this belief. More complex and less usable than the previous ones in the bold combination of rock (hard or prog but unquestionably rock), symphonic, folk and acoustic music, from the point of view of lyrics the album is perhaps the most introspective (when it does not become autobiographical) of the entire production of the group, or it would be more correct to say of Anderson himself, a centralizing minstrel who became the undisputed ruler from the release of "Aqualung" onwards.

Recorded almost entirely in the "Maison Rouge Mobile", a bizarre means of transport equipped as a traveling recording studio with violinists and cellists in tow, during a long journey from England to Munich, the LP opens with the eponymous song, an excellent ensemble of acoustic guitar, flute and strings in an amalgam (occasionally a bit excessive and redundant) of hard and prog arrangements. But it is in songs that form almost a single chapter such as "Cold wind to Valhalla", an excursion into Nordic mythology and "Black satin dancer", a subdued and veiled description of an intercourse, that Anderson's compositional talent is best expressed in the ability to combine acoustic-orchestral elements with folk prog structures, in a balanced and chameleon-like melodic diversification.

"Requiem", a poignant acoustic-classical ballad, tender and bitter flash-back of the end of a love that prolongs the finesse of the stylistic choices and the delicacy of the lyrics in the further ballad "One White Duck/Nothing at all", compositions with a folk-songwriter flavor, intimate and meditative pauses that will step aside to let the four-part suite "Baker Street Muse" (Pig me and the whore, Nice Little Tune, Crash-Barrier Walzer, Mother England Reverie) paints without too much candor or indulgence, squalid and grotesque tabloids of metropolitan life.

But the protagonist is still the mastery of the colorful touch of Ian Anderson, disillusioned and ironic portraitist who captures in variegated harmonic-stylistic overlaps, human miseries and mediocrity, ease and talent capable of emerging even in brief moments of poetry in notes, such as the exquisite 50 seconds of "Grace", a polite epilogue of the work of a band that has never repeated itself,  histrionic in spite of the opposing feelings and reactions that have always accompanied her, perhaps weaker in some paragraphs of her career but nevertheless very personal and sui generis in the modern music scene.

The live performance in Monte Carlo sanctioned the definitive version of "Minstrel in the Gallery" as well as the departure of bassist Jeffrey Hammond-Hammond rekindled by the flame for his ancient passion and activity: painting. And Anderson wanted to dedicate the remastered edition of the album to him, which in 2002 experienced a second rebirth in the historic Abbey Road Studios and enriched with excellent bonus-tracks ("Summerday Sands", "March the Mad scientist", Pan dance and two live recordings of "Minstrel in the Gallery" and "Cold Wind to Valhalla").