Anyone believing they’re unfamiliar with the music of John Martyn might want to take stock for a moment. If you’ve heard America perform “Head and Heart” on their Homecoming album or Eric Clapton’s recording of “May You Never” from Slowhand, you’ve heard a Martyn composition. David Gray covered his “Go Down Easy,” Beck has a rendition of “Stormbringer” and countless other artists have interpreted his music.  But hearing someone else sing his songs isn’t really the ideal way to experience Martyn. The proper introduction would be to check out any of his 1970s Island albums. Or you could locate a copy of or stream the MIG label’s two-disc live concert The Smiling Stranger in Bremen, which found its way over to the U.S. earlier this year.   

     Martyn’s most acclaimed releases and sonically innovative work had been achieved better than thirty-five years before his death in 2009, and they contain exquisite examples of his accomplished guitar playing, his unique stylized vocals and an array of arrangements that include the Echoplex-driven guitar of the jazz/folk trio performances on Inside Out and Live at Leeds, the acoustic renditions of originals and covers that graced the early releases and the electric explorations of Solid Air and One World. The result was a prestigious catalog that, while failing to earn a large commercial fandom, still managed to create a loyal cult following.

     In that respect, Martyn belongs alongside his Island label-mates Fairport Convention, King Crimson and Renaissance, all outliers who flew below the radar but reshaped, redefined and revitalized the British music scene of the 1970s and who have retained a faithful fan base for nearly six decades.    

     But with the waning of the 1970s, the record industry was suddenly less-than-kind to veterans like Martyn, usually hobbling studio albums with the new decade’s over-produced spit-and-polish sound laden with synths and topped off with a more-than-conspicuous drum mix. It’s the very sound heard on Martyn’s 1981 Phil Collins-produced Glorious Fool album and the Sandy Robertson production of 1982’s follow-up, Well Kept Secret, although the latter manages to relax the template long enough to allow a beautifully understated cover of Johnny Ace’s “Never Let Me Go” to sneak in.

     In the assessment of biographer Graeme Thomson, author of Small Hours: The Long Night of John Martyn, “the albums he made in the early Eighties were the most commercially successful of his career…In exchange, the music lost a degree of swerve and swagger and Martyn cashed in a fair chunk of his maverick status. The dedicated margin-hanger, the paid-up non-joiner was now edging towards the center.”

     Martyn was touring behind Well Kept Secret in 1982 and early 1983, sporting a five-piece band that replicated the studio instrumentation of guitar, keyboards, bass, drums and percussion but with less pageantry than the album. Performances in London, Brighton and Oxford yielded tracks for the live album Philentropy, released in November 1983. In his biography of Martyn, Some People Are Crazy, John Neil Munro reports that “the record was an attempt to recoup some of the costs of running a five-piece band…”  

Therefore, somewhere between the album’s recording and release, Martyn stripped down the lineup to himself, drummer Jeff Allen and bassist Alan Thomson. The result, as much a defiant gesture in the face of current industry standards as a more economical means of touring, can be heard on The Smiling Stranger in Bremen, an album that deserves to have been released decades earlier.

      Bremen was one of three cities in Germany to broadcast the audio of Martyn’s concerts in June 1983, and the Smiling Stranger tracks from June 10 are culled from the Radio Bremen archives, which captured one of the more intimate shows of the year’s tours. In Heinsberg, the seating capacity was up to 1,200 and in Koln 840. But, according to online sources, the Schauburg in Bremen had been converted to a cinema a year earlier, its 800-seat hall partitioned into several units used for screenings as well as concerts and other live performances so that capacity was probably no more than a few hundred. Such an environment, more common to Martyn’s early 1970s tours, may have contributed to coaxing the more subtle, more nuanced performances found on Smiling Stranger.

     When compared to Philentropy which, according to the johnmartyn.com website, “was, and is considered by many to be the best live album” of Martyn’s as it’s “charged with atmosphere and excitement and features some of John’s most popular songs,” Smiling Stranger can be seen as its antithesis. If Philentropy is intended to excite then the Bremen show is meant to beguile. As a complete set from a single show, it offers a wider range of songs in an intoxicating two hours that gracefully balance the churning and the introspective.

     More than just compatible accompanists, Thomson and Allen had effectively settled into the trio format that June, with Martyn, untethered from the keyboards and percussion of the previous lineup, free to let his distorted/echoed electric guitar and his vocals soar. His comping here is a tutorial on rhythm guitar playing and dynamics, never pushing but always complementing the rhythm section; his solos, sharing the spotlight with Thomson’s fretless work, are an extension of his vocals, which range from gruff and growling to tender and poignant, sometimes, as in “Bless the Weather,” all in one song.

     And Martyn obviously feels comfortable enough in his explorations. In the rearrangement of “Solid Air,” which abandons its ethereal studio rendering in favor of a pulsing beat, he plays with the rhythm of the lines, even scatting by the end of the tune. In “Lookin’ On,” he and his bandmates not so much cover as conjure Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme.”

     If a song like “Outside In” no longer sports the adventurousness of its mid-1970s performances, its reinterpretation here as part of a medley with “Dealer” demonstrates the not-so obvious relationship of the two pieces and the interconnectedness that defines much of Martyn’s Seventies output. About half of the album is comprised of songs first recorded in the 1970s, and they complement the newer tunes quite nicely.

     One of the special treats offered by Smiling Stranger is a rare 1983 four-song solo acoustic set featuring “The Easy Blues,” a cover of “Cocaine” (in the same arrangement from Martyn’s first album, London Conversation), “One Day Without You” and “May You Never.” Despite its absence as a regular feature of his early 1980s shows, Martyn’s acoustic guitar work still dazzles in this fifteen-minute mini-set.

     Several songs do feature a bit of keyboards, credited by Martyn in his band introductions to Thomson, but they are chordal washes behind the guitar, bass and drums that fill out the arrangements unobtrusively. Their inclusion is functional, not ornamental, and allows the focus to remain on the rhythms, whether funky, shuffled, relaxed, driving or swinging.

     The Smiling Stranger in Bremen is a welcomed addition to the Martyn catalog, a lost live masterpiece that waited patiently for its moment to reveal a retrospective glimpse of an artist who tells his audience at one point in the concert, “Look on me as a lonely minstrel tossed hither and thither like so much flotsam and jetsam on life’s ghastly ocean.” Fair enough, but not all minstrels have the ability to, as John Hillarby writes in the liner notes, “break your heart and heal it in the same song.”