‘The idea of calling it The Dick Aven Band is that I let individual personalities develop for each instrument in a way that let them all be creative on their own even though they are all me.’
- Dick Aven

After listening to this record, you might want to read that again.
Yup. Dick (with one exception) plays all of the instruments on this record. Nothing particularly odd about that. These days, just about everyone with a home studio, it seems, does it.
What’s different about this record is that the composer/performer has created multiple musicians called Dick Aven, each of whom plays his instrument in a separate character, with his own style. What Aven has done is more akin to writing a play, or a film script, where a range of characters – goodies, baddies, clowns – are brought into existence. They owe their birth to their creator. But, make no mistake, they are different people. It is a genius ability that allows Aven to avoid the trap that awaits nearly every musician who plays all the tracks on their record: each of the iterations of the Dick character plays with his own sense of rhythm, his own sense of groove. What is important in this playing is not hands, but ears. Dick plays with his ears. It is why this record feels like a band: it is one. The groove comes first, and many hands make it. The melody is an interpretation of the groove.
What is boils down to is timekeeping. There are lots of rhythm parts – typically, ukulele, bass, MEINL turbo-bass cajon, tambourine, shaker, snare drum, electric guitar – all of which find their own place in the pocket (with no instrument ever doubling – each part is unique.) What is surprising is that Aven can imagine – hold in his head – the polyrhythmy of it all. The result is magic. Very few (and I mean, very few) musicians are capable of doing this.
It is nothing short of wizardry.

Dick Aven is a Nashville-based artist whose main instruments are tenor and baritone saxophones. But, if you were a musical director, you would have no qualms about taking him on the road to play rhythm guitar, ukulele, bass or woodwinds. He composed this record during his downtime while touring with Jamey Johnson this year.

All of the tracks on this record are songs (as opposed to some other musical structure). All of them are in the three-minute range of duration, old optimum length for AM radio hits back in the day. Spin So Long doesn’t just suggest those days, it recreates them. It takes us back to a time when popular music had yet to be put in generic boxes. On any given day back in the seventies, you could hear the Beatles, Frank Sinatra, Otis Redding, B. J. Thomas, Sergio Mendes, Frankie Valli, Dionne Warwick, Al Hirt, Sam Cooke, Tammy Wynette and Lulu all in the same hour on the same AM radio station. Spin So Long is as interesting and unusual – and unique – as that.

This set is all about having exquisite, refined taste. It is about being a connoisseur. It is about possessing the knowledge that allows you to blend sounds that go together in surprising ways. The closest analogy I can make is that of the vintner, or wine blender. I live near Bordeaux, in the southwest of France, home of some of the finest wines in the world. When a winemaker finishes a vintage, it is that summer captured in a bottle (just as the summer of 1967 is forever associated in my memory with Van Morrison’s ‘Brown Eyed Girl). The song is the memory of the summer. With Dick Aven, memory is everything.

The winemaking comparison goes further. Really fine wines have a ‘nose’ – that is, they smell of something other than wine. For instance, good red Bordeaux can have aromas of tobacco, leather, black currant or wet gravel. Obviously, the wine contains none of those. But, it can suggest them. When I tell you that Dick Aven’s songs suggest another artist, I am not saying that he is copying them, or even that he sounds like them: I am saying that he suggests them in the way that the smell of leather can bring to mind certain wines. It is the mnemonic phenomenon that allows me – accurately – to ‘smell’ Gilbert Gil’s Tropicalia sound, and Bobbie Gentry’s ‘Ode To Billie Joe’, in the sticky heat generated by the album’s opening track, ‘Stirred Up’.

This mnemonic magic permeates the entire record, and it is deeply rewarding to identify the scents it throws up.

‘Weightless’ gives Walter Becker and the Brits Gerry Rafferty and actor/songwriter/singer Brian Protheroe, a performer with a cult following.
‘Fly Into The Fire’ channels The Searchers’ ‘Love Potion No. 9’, and showcases Aven’s vocal range, from a Tommy James tenor to a John Lennon falsetto. (I forgot to mention that, if I were a musical director in search of a utility vocalist, Aven could get the nod for that job, too. His vocals are strong and varied in colour and range.)
‘It’s Something’ is my favourite tune on this album. A John Klemmer sax weaves around a Joe Farrell flute that puts the icing on a cake baked by Paul McCartney’s Wings, the whole thing anchored in a pathos worthy of Gilbert O’Sullivan.
The great Brazilian exponent of Tropicalia, Gilberto Gil, was a huge Beatles fan and a
wonderful interpreter of their songs. The title track, ‘Spin So Long’, is their love child with a Phil Collins influenced vocal.
Side 2 does not disappoint, with further explorations deep into this lush soundscape.

Dick Aven trips the switches in your head that brings memory into line with your present listening experience. Few records have so delighted me with their musical sophistication and brilliance of playing. Spin So Long is an act of supreme imagination

Stephen Trombley