Jet lag is what happens when your body arrives somewhere your mind has not. It is a perfect title and a brutally honest one. PFM cut this record in Burbank in January 1977 and finished it in London in February, having spent three years on aeroplanes trying to become an American band, and having just lost the one member who made them sound Italian. What they made instead is a fusion album of startling technical quality that a large part of their audience has never forgiven them for. It is the most divisive record in the catalogue and it is nowhere near as bad as its reputation.

The short version

Released in 1977, recorded at Kendun Recorders in Burbank in January and at Scorpio Sound in London in February, mixed in London and mastered there too, written, arranged and produced by the band. Eight tracks. Bernardo Lanzetti sings and plays percussion; Franco Mussida plays electric and acoustic guitar; Flavio Premoli plays electric piano, organ and Moog; Patrick Djivas plays fretless bass and Moog; Franz Di Cioccio plays drums. And in place of Mauro Pagani there is Gregory Bloch, an American, on acoustic and electric violin. One track is in Italian. It was the last PFM album on Manticore, which folded shortly afterwards.

Pagani leaves

This is the fact everything else follows from. Mauro Pagani was not simply the violinist — he was the woodwinds, the flutes, the folk instruments, the entire argument that PFM were an Italian band and not an English one with better weather. He left, and the woodwinds left with him. Gregory Bloch is a fine player and does a genuinely good job; he is also an American jazz violinist, and what he brings is a woody, swinging tone where there used to be Mellotron and pipes. Meanwhile the band’s Manticore deal — which had started with a chance meeting with Greg Lake and had carried them across the world — was in its last year. Replace your folk instrumentalist with a fusion violinist while your label is dying and you are recording in California. The album could hardly have come out any other way.

The sound

Jazz-rock fusion, almost undisguised. The pastoral Italian symphonic writing is essentially gone; what replaces it is Return to Forever, Brand X, Weather Report, Jean-Luc Ponty, and a fair amount of mid-seventies Zappa in the way the ensemble passages are stacked and locked together. Premoli is extraordinary throughout — electric piano work that stands comparison with the best American players of the period — and Djivas moving to fretless changes the floor under everything. Mussida plays with a restraint he had not shown before. And Lanzetti, of all people, relaxes: the mellow section of the title track is the first time he ever sounds like a singer rather than a performance. The playing is not in dispute. What is in dispute is whether any of it is PFM.

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The songs

Peninsula opens with Mussida alone, under three minutes, gorgeous and completely unlike anything else the band recorded. The title track runs nine minutes: a prog-fusion workout that glides into a long closing section built on Premoli’s soloing, with an outro that goes on rather longer than it needs to. Storia in LA is the instrumental centrepiece — mellow jazz at the outset, deepening as it goes, Premoli first and then Bloch soaring over the top, and the track people cite when they defend this album. Breakin’ In closed side one and is the radio candidate, the hardest-rocking thing here and still full of jazz. Cerca la lingua is the only piece in Italian and opens on a Bloch violin solo. Meridiana, Left-Handed Theory and Traveler take side two, and the consensus is that side two is where the album loosens its grip.

Reception and legacy

It split the audience and the split has never healed. For the RPI faithful this is where PFM ended — the American record, the one with no Pagani and no Italian in it, the beginning of everything that went wrong. For listeners who came in from fusion it is an underrated demonstration of what six musicians at the peak of their technique can do, and they have a case. America did not bite. Manticore closed. The following year the band went the other way entirely with Passpartu, back into Italian and back towards acoustic music, and Lanzetti left. Then came the De Andre collaboration, and PFM turned out to have a second life nobody had predicted. Jet Lag is the hinge.

The verdict

For people who already know this band, and better than you have been told. Storia di un minuto and Per un amico are the masterpieces and Chocolate Kings is the argument; this is the aftermath, and it should be heard as one. Play Peninsula and Storia in LA — nine minutes that will tell you whether you can accept PFM as a fusion band. Then Perigeo’s Abbiamo tutti un blues da piangere for Italians who were doing this on purpose, and Return to Forever for the school. A band with its body in Burbank and its heart somewhere over the Atlantic. They called it exactly right.

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