West Coast Sixties Weirdness At Its' Best

During the psychedelic rock period there were bands called Kaleidoscope on both sides of the Atlantic. This album, Infinite Colours, Infinite Patterns - The Best of Kaleidoscope, is the Californian band. They trecked constantly up and down the west coast in the late sixties appearing on bills with all the other notable LA and Frisco bands of the time but they never got close to making it big. The main reasons for that were a fairly shambolic lifestyle, weak vocals and the lack of a charismatic front man. They produced some superb music though which is featured on this compilation alongside a little dross. More than enough great stuff to make it well worth acquiring, however. Where many west coast bands of the era utilised Indian musical influences and instrumentation for added colour, Kaleidoscope took a more middle eastern route using saz, bazouki, oud and clarinet courtesy of David Solomon Feldthouse. The other major player in the band and best known susequently was David Lindley who had his own band El Rayo X and also has been a serial studio and stage collaborator with people like Ry Cooder, Warren Zevon and particularly Jackson Browne. Lindley contributes banjo, mandolin, fiddle and slide guitar and as that instrumentation indicates, he brought bluegrass and the blues and infleunces to the band. Standout tracks include the cajun workout Petite Fleur which was repeatedly played over the PA to the half million crammed onto the Isle of Wight to see Dylan in 1969, a storming version of the traditional song Cuckoo, Lindley's bajo workout imaginatively called Banjo and the lengthy Seven - Ate Sweet, so called after the time signature and the track with the strongest middle eastern influence.