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With his brilliant new MoonJune Records release What’s Rattlin’ on the Moon, veteran progressive musician and award-winning composer Beppe Crovella (Arti e Mestieri) delivers a heartfelt and long-overdue appreciation of one of the defining voices of the jazz-rock idiom, Soft Machine keyboard player and composer Mike Ratledge. More than any of his more widely recognized former bandmates, it was Ratledge who was truly the heart and soul of Soft Machine, his instantly identifiable sound and forceful, incandescent soloing providing the thread of continuity throughout most of the band’s many incarnations. At a time when many progressive rock keyboardists were surrounding themselves with ever more elaborate arrays of futuristic, often sterile-sounding keyboard instruments, Ratledge managed to produce music of arguably greater depth and vitality armed primarily with an inexpensive modified Lowrey organ and a Rhodes electric piano. Not for Ratledge the precious neoclassicism and faux orchestral flavorings of the progressive genre—his signature overdriven organ gave even guitarists like Softs touring partner Jimi Hendrix a run for their money and flattened many an unsuspecting concertgoer. The rawness and intensity of his Coltrane-inspired sheets of sound imbued Soft Machine’s music with a sense of risk and immediacy that tilted the band into the realm of up-to-the-minute jazz, yet he could just as easily conjure more bucolic moods with his ruminative playing on the electric piano. Ratledge also contributed a number of the group’s most enduring compositions in “Slightly All the Time,” “Out-Bloody-Rageous,” “Esther’s Nose Job,” and “Chloë and the Pirates". Sadly for many Soft Machine enthusiasts, Ratledge has been little seen since he left the band in 1976 — all the more reason to celebrate the release of What’s Rattlin’ on the Moon, on which Crovella breathes new life into a choice selection of classic Ratledge compositions while adding a number of exemplary Softs-inspired tunes of his own. No mere nostalgic re-creation of the Soft Machine oeuvre, What’s Rattlin’ presents a fresh and bracing take on Ratledge’s singular music through novel arrangements and the use of vintage keyboards not normally associated with the Softs, such as (intriguingly) the Mellotron. Perhaps the most radical break with the past here is the absence of a rhythm section or other melody instruments competing for attention; by placing Ratledge’s music fully in the foreground, Crovella cannily illumines key facets of his subject’s musical personality. The undulating ostinati that underlie Crovella’s arrangement of “Chloë and the Pirates” reveal links to early Ratledge influence Terry Riley, while Crovella’s version of “As If”, with its flurries of spiraling, chromatic lines, underscores Ratledge’s affinity for ‘free jazz’ contemporaries like Cecil Taylor. In some cases (“Chloë and the Pirates” , “Pig”) the arrangements hew fairly closely to the recorded originals; in others (“Hibou, Anemone and Bear,” “Out-Bloody-Rageous”) the source material is creatively morphed almost beyond recognition, yet still bears the inimitable stamp of its author. Crovella’s choice of vintage keyboards — no synthesizers or digital keyboards of any kind are used on this recording — is particularly inspired, their organic tones aptly evoking the raspy timbres of Ratledge’s fuzzed-out organ and piano. Crovella’s deep empathy with the Ratledge sound ethos is also evident in the six original compositions with which he augments the program. What’s Rattlin’ is not only a supremely fitting homage to one of the giants of jazz-rock, but in the spirit of its subject, moves the music forward in bold and imaginative ways. It is that rarest of ‘tribute’ albums, one that captures the unique musical gifts of both its dedicatee and creator.