Jan Hammer, The First Seven Days Review

Overall Rating

Far from a classic, but a welcome re-release all the same, Jan Hammer's officially labelled debut solo album from 1975 The First Seven Days (although Make Love predates it by 7 years) tends more to the interesting but not mindblowing compositional style that emerged in Sister Andrea and developed with so much promise on Like Children, his collaboration with ex-Mahavishnu Orchestra co-member Jerry Goodman from the same year; but a writing ability that was totally lost to his favoured commercial ventures which eventually won him a household name.
The synthetic tones are futuristic. Modulator loops pulse in a similar way to those found in Walter/Wendy Carlos' powerful soundtrack to Kubrick's masterpiece A Clockwork Orange. But there the similarity ends. Although Hammer's extended passages do attempt to explore novel soundspace while telling his musical take on the first week of history, this album does not offer anything as innovative as other more enduring, comparable electronic atmospheric studies, such as for example, Carlos' Sonic Seasonings.