John Mayall seems like a real nice guy. Enjoying a long string of hit blues albums, he has nevertheless more than paid his dues. When he was still recording the work of his black mentors, he always credited correctly and presumably they got the royalties so often ripped off. He ran a finishing school for Young Turk musicians like no other in rock. Each of his recent albums has contained public service message on subjects of importance, and his latest, leading off with an ecological epistle, even contains a table of household hints useful for individual action in the war against pollution. Clearly, whatever the reaction to such efforts, John Mayall is a sincere man who cares both about the state of the world and his audience's awareness of it.

All that said, we are forced to proceed to the less pleasant task of assessing Mayall's music. Ever since the last couple of Blues Breakers albums, John has been incorporating diverse elements into his music and discarding them at a leisurely, experimental pace. Through all this however, the basic components worked with by Mayall and his sometimes brilliant juxtapositions of sidemen have remained so static that nobody even expects them to change.

In a way, you can't really criticize albums like Empty Rooms and USA Union at all. Technically they're just about flawless (and well they should be, by this time), and John Mayall fans will, I suspect, bathe in them like periodic holidays, never doubting the uniform quality of the next release and never asking for more than they get. Others will grant that these albums show impeccable musicianship, but add that they have to force themselves to hear what's playing.

At least the company is good: Larry Taylor from Canned Heat on bass; guitarist Harvey Mandel of the Muzak-rock album and sometime service to Canned Heat; and the great violinist from the Johnny Otis Show and Hot Rats, Sugarcane Harris. As usual with Mayall, however, soloists who may be brilliant elsewhere turn in nice, competent performances that lack essential fire in the same way that so much of Mayall's music, including some of his "rawest" late-Blues Breakers sides, seems just a shade too placid.

Taylor mostly settles for ensuring the drumless ensemble a constant bottom pulse, Mandel's work is sure-handed but hardly inspiring, and only Harris leaps out occasionally, experimenting successfully with wah-wah violin and spinning out a haunting, gypsyish solo on "Nature's Disappearing." As for the compositions, they're mainstream Mayall. Read the lyrics and you can already hear the melody in your head: "My pretty girl sitting in her room of red/My pretty girl lying on her furry bed/Pretty as the moonlight/I only want to treat her right ..." etc.

Chico Hamilton led a series of quiet quartets and quintets in the mid-Fifties that played a rather delicate brand of jazz that came to be called Chamber Jazz Mayall's recent bands also are chamber groups, and they suffer in comparison to the more dynamic elements of today's music exactly as Hamilton's did next to hard bop—by an elegant subtlety so under-stated it broaches background music. USA Union is a very pleasant album, and I expect to keep it, but only to play at certain times and for certain purposes. If the Stones are speed, and Van Morrison is fine red wine, Mayall in 1970 is pure Librium — safe, soothing, non-toxic, non-habituating and very specific. (RS 73)

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