The Free Design - Butterflies Are Free - The Original Recordings 1967-72 (2020) [CD Rip]

4CD collection of original material by The Free Design. The Dedrick children, Chris, his brother Bruce, their sister Sandra and their younger sisters Ellen and Stefanie, were born into a world of music. Their father, Art, was a trombonist and arranger, their mother a music teacher who played French horn. Uncle Rusty, a jazz trumpeter with Red Norvo.

Under the influence of the Hi-Lo’s and Peter, Paul and Mary, The Free Design rose through the folk scene of the Greenwich Village coffee houses, achieving national prominence with the enchanting Kites Are Fun. They would prove to be at least the artistic equals of such popular contemporaries as The Association, The Mamas and the Papas, The Fifth Dimension and Harper’s Bizarre, but without quite matching their commercial success.

Rather than be dictated to and diluted by the majors, they chose to commit to the artistic freedom and potential to develop offered them by the producer Enoch Light through his independent set up, Project 3. While his label might not have been able to provide the resources of a Columbia or RCA, he believed in the group, gave them carte blanche and hired some of the finest session musicians in New York to back them.

The decision to put their art first was justified by the extraordinary quality of the seven albums recorded between 1967 and 1972. We have Enoch Light’s vision and the group’s brave decision to stick to their guns to thank for the fact that this splendid music exists today.

During the 1990’s The Free Design enjoyed a renaissance. The enthusiastic reevaluation of their work by a new generation of international musicians; Cornelius, Beck, Stereolab and the High Llamas, who insisted that The Free Design be placed among the all-time greats of vocal harmony; to be spoken of in the same sentence as The Beach Boys and The Carpenters.

With exceptions, The Free Design were at their most pure in recordings of their own compositions. Kites Are Fun, Bubbles, Kije’s Ouija, My Brother Woody, Ivy On A Windy Day, Starlight, Daniel Dolphin, I’m A Yogi, My Very Own Angel, and the Dorian Benediction, each adorned by the baroque fantasy quality which is uniquely theirs. Breathtakingly original songs full of playful, nostalgic lyrical imagery; sometimes surprisingly dark; always enormously listenable.

Whilst the arrangements reflected Chris Dedrick’s classical training and eclectic taste, the beautifully detailed sound must be attributed – at least in part – to the legendary sound engineer Phil Ramone, a magician whose emphasis on subtlety and nuance in performance conceived such creations as The Girl from Ipanema by Astrud Gilberto, Me And Julio Down By The Schoolyard by Paul Simon, the Bob Dylan album, Blood On the Tracks, and, of course, Bubbles by The Free Design.