The Rarefied Air of Air

Of an unknown jazz-rock classic, and the power and glory of Googie Coppola

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Aug 26, 2025

Hello again music lovers!

Have I got something special for you this time around. My essay for this edition takes a look at one of the great unheralded albums of the early seventies: the 1971 release by Air, a group whose music escapes easy categorization. Powered by the voice and songs of Googie Coppola, Air is the kind of album that doesn’t create fans but devotees out of those entranced by its hypnotic and unique feel.

In addition to my essay, I have some supplemental pieces that I think will deepen your appreciation of Air. First, the writer behind the brilliant music Substack,

wordsworthesq

, has contributed a fantastic piece with more albums and bands like Air that feature strong female singers. There are some rare gems unearthed and if you aren’t already a subscriber to wordsworthesq, and you love music and the kind of writing that you don’t find anywhere else, you’ll want to click right away and subscribe!

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Secondly, I was able to connect with Rob Butler, owner of Be With Records, who spearheaded the only (so far) reissue of the album on vinyl, for a brief email interview.

An expanded edition of Listening Sessions like this one is what I want to do more often. That’s why I hope you may consider taking out a paid subscription to support my work. I’ve reduced the price of monthly and annual subscriptions to reflect that there’s a lot of great writers and writing to vie for your hard-earned money. Supporting me for $5/month or $35/year (both in Canadian dollars) will go a long way to help me do more of these pieces, including being able to sign on for services that will allow me to offer podcasts and other audio/visual material as well as to potentially offer an honorarium to contributors. If 50 of you were to click below, I could start right away! However you may be able to support me, I am grateful and appreciative.

Until next time, may good listening be with you all!

The Rarefied Air of Air
By: Robert C. Gilbert

Record collecting doesn’t have to be a costly endeavour. Cheap vinyl is a dime a dozen and sometimes costs no more than that, and a solid portion of my collection is built on inexpensive vintage and thrifted LPs. But this man can’t live by the discount bin alone. Sometimes I have to open up my wallet just a little bit more to get the essential esoteric stuff. For this, the seller knows the value and won’t settle for anything less. It’s an extravagance for sure but one that can be understood and indulged in every once in a while. It’s why I recently spent over $100 through eBay for an album from 1971. That’s not something I’ve done before and not something I’ll do again any time soon. But, in a sense, I didn't really have a choice in the matter.

Nineteen seventy-one fell in the middle of a glorious era for the female singer. Carole King released the most popular album of the year, Tapestry (she would release another album, Music, before the year was out). Joni Mitchell released one of the year’s most beloved albums, Blue. It was also a time of Roberta Flack and Aretha Franklin, Anne Murray and Linda Ronstadt, Mavis Staples and Karen Carpenter, just for starters. All had voices that commanded attention. All had unique approaches to interpreting their own songs or those of other songwriters.

Around this nucleus were other singers who pushed a little further, daring the listener to come along for the musical ride. Grace Slick and Janis Joplin come to mind here as do Lydia Pense of Cold Blood and Genya Ravan of Ten Wheel Drive. Judee Sill was equally provocative.

Personally, I hold Laura Nyro as the ideal of the female singer who would almost dare to drive you away and if she did not succeed in doing so, it would be because she had reached you on a level lingering around the profound. How else to characterize the devotional feel of her concerts in 1970 and 1971. Not a sound can be heard while she was singing and playing, and then the rush of applause and cheers as the last note of a song decayed into nothing. Fandom meant something else when it was applied to Nyro. I’ve known that for a long time.

Consequently, there is a thrill when I discover an artist from Nyro’s heyday who captured her hypnotic essence. It happened upon finding Susan Carter’s 1970 LP, Wonderful Deeds and Adventures, recorded with most of the musicians from Blood, Sweat & Tears, and Lily & Maria’s lone album, released on Columbia in 1968, a brittle, acid-folk travelogue of life in New York. It happened again when I stumbled upon an album from 1971 by a group called Air. And that’s why I eventually spent over 100 bucks to snag a sealed copy.

I came to it, as I did with Carter and Lily & Maria, through Spotify (that it’s quite possibly the only way to find recordings like these is a cause for pause). The names that leap out on the album’s credits are those on the outer edge of the core group. There’s Randy and Michael Brecker. Jan Hammer and Bobby Rosengarden are there too as well as Herbie Mann.

The flutist has still not gotten his full due as one of the most adventurous of the jazz musicians who were increasingly adding a rock sensibility to the music. His working band in the late sixties included tenor saxophonist Steve Marcus, vibraphonist Roy Ayers, bassist Miroslav Vitous and guitarist Sonny Sharrock—an aggregation impossible to conceive if it had not actually existed (Marcus’ wild late-sixties recordings for Vortex remain way too underappreciated). 1969’s Memphis Underground—minus Marcus and Vitous but with guitarist Larry Coryell added—was a bold union of nascent jazz-rock with the locked-in groove of the Memphis Boys of American Sound Studio.

The impulse to create outside of the strict boundaries of jazz had been with Mann for a long time, including his popular, minimalist version of ‘Comin’ Home Baby’ recorded at the Village Gate in 1961. It was at that New York club eight years later where Mann first heard Air and signed them to his label, Embryo Records. He produced their self-titled debut.

The band come together in a most New York way, through an ad in the Village Voice. The ad was placed by keyboardist Moogy Klingman for bassist John Siegler and drummer Mark Rosengarden (Bobby’s son). Answering it was Googie and Tom Coppola.

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Googie was a singer and songwriter, and Tom was a keyboard player. They met in the late sixties at Manhattan College, gigged around New York, got married and had a child, and with Siegler and Rosengarden, became Air.

Prior to Air’s debut album, Googie had appeared on Brazilian musician Hermeto Pascoal’s 1970 album, Hermeto, providing a wordless vocal on ‘Guizos,’ the kind of orchestral piece flitting between jazz and rock that was in vogue at the time. Her vocal reveals a formidable presence, especially when she soars into a higher register, as well as impeccable control, never boiling over. She was a new style of singer, similar, in one sense, to Flora Purim who also appeared on the Pascoal album and whom Googie would work with later in the seventies.

Air was equally innovative, more in the style of a group like Dreams, which included the Brecker brothers, Billy Cobham and John Abercrombie, than Blood, Sweat & Tears. They also backed Mann live. A Billboard notice from 1971 reported that Air appeared with him and Sharrock at the Village Gate, and noted they performed Stephen Stills’ ‘Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,’ a hint at what could have been if they had all recorded an album together.

I suspect it would have been different than the music captured on Air. Nine of its eleven songs were written by Googie. The two that weren’t: ‘Sister Bessie,’ written by Klingman, and ‘I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free,’ written by Dr. Billy Taylor and Dick Dallas, are the most conventional with clearly marked verses and choruses. The latter, which closes the album and features just Googie singing and playing piano from her home at the time in the Bronx, points to the strong connection between her and Nyro even as nothing I read in researching this essay points to any connection between the two. It also underlines the centrality of Googie to the record.

If you don’t feel the power of her artistry, you’re not going to feel this album. But if you do, you may soon be like me and scour the Web for a copy.

Googie’s delivery of a lyric weaves together the whole of Air. She often lags behind the beat. A lyric line lingers. On the opening question of the album opener, ‘Realize,’ she asks “do you realize / the need to live.” She stretches the notes here. The decay takes a while to complete. For the third question, “do you feel when your body cries out for life,” she moves up the register, the line arcing upward. ‘Realize’ then becomes an exercise in how Googie sings her words and the various shadings and inflections she applies to them. That indelible sound—the stretching out of the word “realize” over and over again, each time a little different than the previous one—is hard to shake. There are many such moments on the album.

For one example, there’s her cool, detached touch on “Mr. Man” on the song of the same name as it shifts into tempo or how, after a brief gospel pattern on piano, she declares “say the man’s got real good style” on ‘Man’s Got Style.’ These slivers of sound ingratiate themselves into one’s mind, appearing again at unexpected moments in daily routine, signaling the gradual enmeshment of the album with life. It’s hard to think of another album that works in this way.

But back to ‘Man’s Got Style.’ The opening line climaxes with Googie singing “and so you see, that piece of mind”—there’s then a dramatic pause, and then she continues—“is real.” The musicians then lock into high gear, led by Tom Coppola’s organ, as Googie relates how the protagonist of the song had a troubled relationship with her previous guy. The music cools down for her to lightly go “oh, la, la, la, la…” and then picks up as she repeats the song’s opening lines—note her variation on the melody and phrasing—suggesting a redemption that she was found with this stylish man.

Moments of sudden infusions of energy are what also make Air far beyond the norm, like the opening declaration of ‘Man is Free’ or the knotty stutter that starts ‘Babe, I Don’t Know Where Love.’ It’s also in how the album is a melting pot. It’s a rock or pop album—depending on one’s definition of these terms—of succinct songs. It’s also a jazz album with a significant amount of improvisation, primarily by Tom Coppola on organ or electric piano and Randy Brecker on trumpet. He’s heard best with his wah-wah obligatos on ‘Mr. Man’ and the tough, street-wise solo on ‘Man is Free.’

There is one instrumental: ‘Lipstick.’ That spotlights Michael Brecker on soprano saxophone. It serves as an interlude between ‘Sister Bessie’ and ‘Man’s Got Style.’ And it’s well needed after a song about a nun from the perspective of the man she’s taken LSD with and also slept with. Even bolder is ‘Martin,’ which envisions Dr. King as a spirit, travelling among those who must go on without him. It’s a moving song that seems to operate on dream logic. It floats where most of Air struts along the ground.

Following it is ‘In Our Time,’ the most structurally ambitious of the songs Googie wrote for the album. It moves from section to section, incorporating Afro-Cuban rhythms, a part in rubato, a baroque interlude dominated by a harpsichord and much more. ‘Jail Cell’ is the most theatrical with the repetition of the line “I’ll never deceive you,” even if it doesn’t, for me, hit with the same impact as the rest of the album.

The quietness of ‘I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free’ is a benediction like any quiet closing to an album that is anything but. Soon after Air was released, the group was no more. Googie spent time at a Christian commune in Chicago. In 1980, she and Tom recorded and released the religious-themed Shine the Light of Love for Columbia Records. It’s light years away from what they did with Air. It’s glossy yacht rock in the last days of the disco craze with Googie’s voice restrained and undistinguished.

Prior to that album, she appeared on a series of recordings, primarily for CTI, in the late seventies. She provided a fittingly mechanical lead for keyboardist David Matthews’ cover of David Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity.’ She co-wrote and sang a wordless lead on flutist Jeremy Steig’s ‘Firefly’ from the album of the same name, and also sang on violinist and guitarist John Blair’s We Belong Together.

Her voice also weaved around Flora Purim and Urszula Dudziak’s on the title track to Purim’s Encounter, the closest re-capturing of the daringness of Air, both the group and the album. They, and Googie herself, remain in the shadows, awaiting the moment for their proper discovery. I hope that day is soon.

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Suggestions for Further Listening
By: wordsworthesq

When Robert posted Air a couple of weeks ago, I was compelled to check it out because I love exploring artists and albums that have fallen through the cracks, especially albums featuring women with powerful voices like Googie Coppola. He graciously invited me to submit some suggestions for further listening and here are a few of the many we bounced around as viable candidates. This is by no means authoritative. It is but a starting point that may lead you to some exciting discoveries of your own. The good news is all of them are accessible via streaming or a search of YouTube, if that is how you consume music:

Judy Henske & Jerry Yester – Farewell to Aldebaran

After creating a blueprint for folk-rock with her stunning take on Billy Edd Wheeler’s ‘High-Flying Bird’ (we’ll come back to that song shortly), Henske became a fixture on New York’s nightclub circuit before settling in Laurel Canyon. There, in the grip of a fever, she wrote most of the lyrics for Farewell to Aldebaran, a disarmingly eclectic collection of songs that are suffused with darkness and death to the extent that you could be forgiven for assuming they are drawn from child ballads. That almost singular focus, and Henske’s deep, rich timbre, provides a unifying thread that makes it possible to navigate an album that careens from merry-go-round wooziness to hard rock to countrified psychedelia to an album closer that is so other worldly and futuristic it’s like a front-row seat for the end of the universe.

Ill Wind – Flashes

The first song of this ’68 psych-rock album will not likely raise questions about why Ill Wind were a one-and-done proposition. But on the second song, ‘People of the Night,’ they decide to stretch out and, more crucially, hand the mic off to Connie Devanney. Suddenly, everything they do matters. She has a piercing voice that not only grabs your attention, but also pins you like a specimen for dissection. It’s astonishing and yet frustrating, because this one mishandled album leaves you wanting to hear so much more. The key cut is their cover of ‘High-Flying Bird,’ where Devanney devolves into a howl so anguished and primal that just telling you about it gives me chills. It is rare, it is pricey and it is worth hunting down.

Norma Tanega – Walkin’ My Cat Named Dog

For a long time, Tanega was mainly known for a song that will scan to some as a novelty hit. But thanks to What We Do in the Shadows, that has changed. Tanega’s 1966 debut album occupies a liminal space between traditional folk songs and a bold new era where autobiographic and impressionistic artists like Joni Mitchell would thrive. But the ways in which Tanega was ahead of her time are notable. You can hear it in songs like ‘You’re Dead,’ a sarcastic riposte to the demands of the music industry that is so lively and fleet of foot it is hard to believe it was recorded 60 years ago. But you can also hear it in her lyrics, which are sprinkled with both subtle and loud and proud references to queer love, in particular her take on ‘In the Pines.’ If her smokey voice reminds you a bit of Dusty Springfield, that’s apt. They were an item back in the day. But she is a unique talent worth exploring independent of that fact.

Minnie Riperton – Come to My Garden

Before she earned her only hit with ‘Lovin’ You,’ and around the time her psych rock band Rotary Connection was winding down, Riperton made this album with her husband, Richard Rudolph, Charles Stepney and legendary musicians Ramsey Lewis, Phil Upchurch, Cleveland Eaton and Maurice White. My understanding is that Riperton wanted it to be a Burt Bacharach-styled set and I hear that, albeit through an acid haze. At times, its baroque arrangements border on avant-garde, akin to a contemporaneous Scott Walker album. That’s reinforced by Riperton’s whistle-register vocalizations which remind me of a theremin. But when she applies that flex to the lyrics of ‘Expecting’ or the grandeur of ‘Les Fleur’ (sic), it can induce intimations of past lives and future lives such that you feel that existence is not a finite experience.

Lotti Golden – Motor-Cycle

Golden will likely remind you of Laura Nyro. They have similar influences, an uncanny ability to synthesize those influences and are both singularly New York in their ethos. The difference is the way Golden draws inspiration from life in the Big Apple. Just a teen when she wrote Motor-Cycle, Golden fashioned a loose concept album that is part Orpheus descending, part Alice in Wonderland, and part even more debauched ‘Sister Ray.’ Plus it’s autobiographical, to an extent. This is a wild ride, with extended compositions that patchwork quilt together various musical genres and lyrics where parties and seeking purpose are moveable feasts unshaken even by death. But Golden’s urgent, wild vocals—recorded in marathon live sessions—somehow hold it all together even as they flirt with mania. If you get on its wavelength, which is not guaranteed, you’ll be a fervent acolyte.

Peter Ivers Band with Yolande Bavan – Knight of the Blue Communion

Bavan made her name as a jazz vocalist before connecting with future David Lynch collaborator and New Wave Theatre host Peter Ivers. The result is a mind-melting bouillabaisse of blues, jazz and chamber music served with stream-of-consciousness musings on consumerism, god and who knows what. Some compare it to Beefheart. Some to Zappa. But it is bluesier and groovier, and weirder too. And with Bavan, it is more ceremonial or theatrical. Her declamations, her whoops, her incantations—they confer a swing, a coolness, a sensuality and an otherness that keep you locked in even when things are at their most esoteric. The result is an album that could have opened the door to a distinctly American form of prog rock if only more people had taken communion.

And if these suggestions leave you craving more, consider checking out Julie Driscoll, Neighb’rhood Childr’n (Dyan Hoffman), Cold Blood (Lydia Pense), the United States of America (Dorothy Moskowitz), Zephyr (Candy Givens), Fear Itself (featuring guitar legend Ellen McIllwaine), Nancy Priddy, It’s a Beautiful Day (Linda LaFlamme), Fifty Foot Hose (Nancy Blossom), Ten Wheel Drive (Genya Ravan), the Insect Trust (Nancy Jeffries) and, of course, Laura Nyro.

The Rarefied Air of Air

Of an unknown jazz-rock classic, and the power and glory of Googie Coppola

Listening Sessions is a reader-supported publication. To support my work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. New, lower cost for yearly and monthly subscriptions!

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