Dieter Miekautsch

Otto Gwiasda

Maria Archer

Toffi Mache

Marlon Klein

Real Ax Band - Just Vibrations - Live at the Quartier Latin 1978 / CD release 2018

40 years after the first LP release, the Real Ax Band is back in action: in April 2018, the CD 'Just Vibrations - Live at the Quartier Berlin', is released, a live album, which was recorded in the Berlin 'Quartier Latin' in April 1978. For decades this club was one of the mist important venues for Jazz, Rock, Fusion, World and Blues in Berlin. Today it is again named 'Winter Garten' as during Berlin's roaring 1920s. 'Just Vibrations' is a rare musical document- reflecting very much the Zeitgeist of Germany's 1970's. It was never released before and shows how the group refined their Style from being part of German Krautrock to become a vital part of European Fusion Music.

Thomas Müller-Berlin, the first keyboarder of the band from 1976 to 1977, wrote the following article for the Hamburg 'Musikexpress' shortly after the successful Berlin concert, alongside 'Sounds' one of the hippest German music magazines back then.

Unfazed by the New Wave, the rebirth of rock'n'roll, and the bombast of German aural excess, a whole heap of musicians here are going their own way. The Real Ax Band, for example.

Nicht Stehen Bleiben /Move Your Ass In Time is the title of the Real Ax Band's first, self-financed LP on Schneeball, recorded last summer in Switzerland's Sunrise-Studio. Afterwards things took a while. In-between three musicians had to go to hospital, and somebody stole their uninsured PA from the band's country seat, Hof Hirschberg. In December 1977 the record finally appeared, selling two thousand copies without any advertising at Schneeball 'network' concerts and via friends of friends.

For exactly a year the band has had its present line-up: Toffi Mache, bass; Marlon Klein, drums; Otto Gwiasda, guitar; Dieter Miekautsch, piano; and the dusky-skinned Maria Archer from London (Ghana), vocals. Well before that, its rhythm section of Toffi Mache and Marlon Klein toured German clubs and halls with the most diverse jazz, rock and soul combinations, managing to turn the heads of public and promoter alike at big festivals such as Vlotho's 'Umsonst und Draussen' (Free and Outside) festival in '76 and '77. Things really got going when Dieter Miekautsch and Maria Archer, both of whom had earlier been with Embryo, joined the Real Ax Band after a year's sojourn in Africa. Together the five musicians developed a style of music with tight arrangements over loose-limbed grooves. A music on a scale between airiness and heavy funk emerged; as did a samba/salsa feel that, not coincidentally, owed something to the two newcomers' time in Africa Somewhat apart from the tides of fashion, the band's trademark style has become a byword with friends of jazz-rock and concert-goers.

'You must be mad!' was the outcry from colleagues in the German rock business and numerous people in the know when they heard what the Real Ax Band had planned. They wanted to live off the music, working their way up without professional management, without some large company backing them financially, without a music publisher, without the promotional razzamatazz that breaks new acts. They got support and encouragement from friends such as Embyro, Missus Beastly, Ton Steine Scherben who in the meanwhile had more or less successfully done 'their own thing' and brought them into contact with the alternative label April, later Schmeeball.

The best advert in such a case is their concerts. Each month they play some ten to fifteen gigs. All told the band spends two months each year stuck im the Mercedes bus. Travelling 400 km to do a DM 500 gig sounds unbelievable. And where else do musicians personally slide records into the sleeves? Everything that is normally down to management/crew and support, gets done by the Real Ax Band itself, albeit with a little help from a thousand friends...

Apart from playing bass, Toffi looks after touring with organisers, staying in touch with all manner of people. Marlon handles record distribution for Northern Germany. Maria and Dieter compose as well as making the band bus purr. Guitarist Otto personally visits the pressing plant, listening to one album after the other in order to sift out bad pressings.

All in all a great deal of activity. But the band still isn't out of the red. There is still 25.000 outstanding to extract from friends and patrons for Move Your Ass In Time and the P.A.For some considerable time, apart from at concerts and in newspaper gig guides hardly anyone will have heard or read of the Real Ax Band - truly a band from nowhere.

In the meanwhile the LP has gone to a second pressing: the nay-sayers have hushed. The LP is shifting without the benefit of costly advertising, selling just through word of mouth and through radio programmers who are delighted for once to have a German production that stands out from the bulk of German music. In-between consignments have gone to Austria, Switerland, France, the USA and Japan. And if appearances are anything to go by, things bode well for a summer of festivals as well as tours to Poland, France and probably East Germany.

One can buy the Real Ax Band's Nicht Stehenbleiben/Move Your Ass In Time at their concerts, any other April/Schneeball act gigs and in some specialist record shops.

How does that lovely expression go? I'd travel miles...for good music !

Musikexpress 05/1978 by Thomas Mueller

Jazzdimension

Real Ax Band - "Move your ass in time"

Krautrock-Bands gab es eine ganze Menge - die “Real Ax Band” jedoch besaß zwei entscheidende hervorstechende Merkmale gegenüber dem Rest der Bands der Spätsiebziger. Das eine war, mit Maria Archer, eine Sängerin “echt” aus London. Das andere: ein wahnwitziges Spieltempo innerhalb der Songs. So sind die Aufnahmen aus dem Jahre 1977 denn nicht nur Zeitdokument, sondern immer noch ein Genuß..

Daß der Konsum von Drogen in der damaligen Musikszene keine geringe Rolle spielte, dokumentieren sowohl die Bandphotos als auch das Cover des Albums.Der Versuch, das Kommunenleben in den 80er hinüberzuretten gelang hingegen selten, so auch nicht in diesem Fall. Nach dem Diebstahl ihrer gesamten Ausrüstung löste sich denn auch die Real Ax Band auf. Uns bleiben die Songs dieses Albums - aufgenommen im Schweizer Sunrise-Studio. Musikalisch eine schräge Mischung aus Psychedelic, Rock , Funk, Salsa und Groove. Keine Musik für schwache Nerven, denn der nervöse Drive der Gruppe überträgt sich auf den Hörer.Aber geniale Musik mit dem hervorstechenden, präzisen und antreibenden Schlagzeugspiel von Marlon Klein - dem späteren Dissidenten - Drummer.

Jazzdimension 2011 by Carina Prange

Essay - Real Ax Band - Move Your Ass In Time / Nicht Stehen Bleiben - CD release 2001

Irrespective of society, country or marketing creed, it is a simple fact of supply and demand that scarcity ratchets up prices. Look at the sighingly high prices that certain record pressings command. Rarity value and collectability go hand in hand. In extreme cases when demand outstrips supply suppliers may have recourse to 'alternative' options in order to meet demand. Ugly words like bootleg and pirate spring to mind. Consequently, many a reissue has been predicated more on the original record's rarity value than its aesthetic or musical worth, conjuring the sneer of Ireland's wit and man of letters Oscar Wilde who famously put down an opponent marking him as somebody who knew the price of everything and the value of nothing. This is the Real Ax Band's only album. Its initial pressing reached maybe 2500 or so copies - to be frank, nobody seems sure, those were different times and a different spirit was abroad. That, and the fact that 'Nicht Stehenbleiben/Move Your Ass In Time' commanded high enough prices to become a pirate CD, would qualify it as proper supply-and-demand KrautRock rarity on several counts. But much more important is its musical worth. And its place in the history...

Marlon Klein and Toffi Mache founded the Real Ax Band in the unusually long, unusually hot summer of 1976 when mercury was exploring rarely visited barometric heights. Between then and early 1977 people came and went while the group played dozens of small Beatschuppen and clubs in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. Early in 1977 the line-up that made this album coalesced when Maria Archer, Heinz-Otto Gwiasda and Dieter Miekautsch entered the frame. Maria Archer and Dieter Miekautsch were newly returned from Africa and were looking for a new band with whom they could perform. Both had already worked with Embryo, a chimera of a collective first founded in 1969 that defied - and defies - any stab at tidy-mindedness or attempt at musical compartmentalisation. By 2000 some fool calculated that Embryo had had more than 300 collaborators pass through its ranks, so, historically speaking, Maria Archer and Dieter Miekautsch figure as relatively early participants in Embryo's experiment - the kind of experiment that Georg Capellen predicted as early as 1906 and dubbed Weltmusik or 'world music' in English.

Of course, the Real Ax Band was a young band very much stamped in the temper of its time. It mixed and matched rock, jazz, soul and Latino elements in ways that showed off influences with candour and little attempt at concealing the group's influences. In Maria Archer the group had a vocalist who sounded real when singing English, not like KrautRock's standard painful Anglo-American imitation from over somebody's weirdest rainbow. She came from Ghana. That helped.

When this line-up of the Real Ax Band came together, it was a time in Germany, as anyone who lived through the period will remember, when many were still living the dream of community hard. Many bands lived in Wohngemeinschaften or Kommunen - the choice of word largely determined by social or political adherences. Some bands living in communes emulated the likes of the Grateful Dead in Haight-Ashbury or Traffic in the Berkshire countryside. Most were just flat-sharing under a more grandiose guise, sharing a living space with like-minded people, whether connected by music, art, politics or a mutual search for something better but until then...

One day the Real Ax Band’s drummer, Marlon Klein, later of Dissidenten fame, went to load up the band-bus for the next gig. Mercifully, somebody had already stowed the gear and the equipment room was empty. One by one, late-risers stumbled into the Wohngemeinschaft's kitchen. They sat chatting, breakfasting, drinking coffee. Until it came out that nobody had loaded the van. With the theft of their unpaid equipment went their idealism and innocence. The theft saddled them with a bunch of debts that the small fees they could command would take years to clear. Sometimes all it takes to tip a band over the edge is one disaster. It signalled the end of the Real Ax Band. The band crumbled. Nicht Stehenbleiben/Move Your Ass In Time is all that remains of that youthful excitement. But the Real Ax Band led to still better things...

Ken Hunt April 2001