Anyone handing a set of unreleased 1970s pop songs over to a figure such as the distinguished experimental musician Jim O’Rourke for remastering is presumably hoping for something. In this case, there are several reasons why the result is interesting. Before the period from which these recordings date, Tommy Peltier had been a trumpeter, but is said to have had to begin again at the end of the 1960s after an injury to the mouth. He then tried his hand as a singer, with help from jazz colleagues and from the singer-songwriter Judee Sill, a friend whose own rediscovery around twenty years ago was likewise aided by a mix by Jim O’Rourke.
Tommy Peltier’s archive is not being presented on Echo Park for the first time as a work of musical archaeology, but the pieces gathered here have until now existed, if at all, only in other versions. Much of it can therefore be discovered afresh, among it the song »Flight of the Dancer«, which, with its softly weeping guitar, chromatically rising and falling harmonies, and magnificently dynamic structure – including occasional pauses and background choir – provides a fitting setting for Peltier’s unusually high, slightly pressed voice.
Other songs are more modest in their bearing, such as »Oneness«, which quietly circles around a handful of notes and, in its gently repetitive structure, suggests a subtly consciousness-expanding form of folk. From time to time, Judee Sill also appears. With Tommy Peltier, one can travel back into an all-too-familiar decade as though for the first time.
