Sweet Smoke

Sweet Smoke were in essence a mystical jazz band that started in the mid sixties in Brooklyn New York. The group first known as Ice Company played their first regular gigs in St Thomas in the Virgin Islands until renamed as the controversial Sweet Smoke of the Happy Plant Pipeful. They eventually opted for the Hashish referred Sweet Smoke thanks to the German sculptor Waldemar Kuhn their spiritual mentor. The group comprised Andrew Dershin (bass), Michael Paris (tenor sax / vox), Jay Dorfman (drums), Steve Rosenstein (guitar / vox), & Marvin Kaminowitz (guitar / vox) who initially replaced the speedy jazz guitarist Victor Sacco. Sweet Smoke relocated to Emmerich on the Dutch border in 1969 and released Just a Poke (1970) and Darkness to Light (1972). The latter expelled the elaborate “Silly Sally” which enters with ambient flute solidifying into a lengthy jazz exercise with an outstanding drum solo by Jay Dorfman harking to the latent shimmers of the Doors’ “Soft Parade”.

Darkness to Light was more of a spiritual communion of assorted musicians, it did however lack the imagination of their previous magic and leaned more to the Mahavishnu Orchestra. The melancholic “Just Another Empty Dream” and ambient “I’d Rather Burn Than Disappear” lacked the jazz scale and leaned toward a medieval slant. In 1974 they launched Sweet Smoke Live in Berlin for the benefit of’ Ananda Marga Yoga Society’ which included the unrecorded “People Are Hard”, “Schyler’s Song”and the lengthy “Shadeout Mapes”, a character in the sci-fi soundtrack Dune.