‘Classic Vinyl Series.’

After two years’ preoccupation with the Miles Davis Quartet, here is Herbie in 1968, ready for the seventies, the old, uptight bebop instincts melting into the balmy, open, innocent textures of fluegelhorn, bass trombone and alto flute, and his own lightly beautiful playing.
‘Classic Vinyl series.’

The shimmering brilliance of his post-bop Blue Notes, crossed with the JBs and the Family Stone; all of it bathed in Afrofuturism.
We must save jazz from itself, Herbie is saying. Future-shock-treatment; the same surgery pioneered by Miles Davis MD. 
Game-changing music, with the fizz and urgency of a live setting; beautifully recorded.
Speakers Corner always does the business.

It opens with HH alone on concert grand, in a lyrical variation of Maiden Voyage, finally reprised by the band, then startlingly segued with Actual Proof, from the new-out Thrust album: already, the zero-gravity glimpse of a transmogrified jazz standard, sixties dues paid; and Herbie perversely tearing up a fender-rhodes future-classic, on acoustic piano…. then straight into Paul Jackson and Mike Clark, one of the very greatest rhythm sections of all time, setting Spank-A-Lee on fire, with Bill Summers on congas, Herbie returning on electric keys, guitarist DeWayne McKnight (prior to locking onto the Mothership)... the unmistakable opening bars of Watermelon Man, ushering Bennie Maupin into full flight… a slinky, skittering Butterfly… a rowdy Chameleon, with Herbie giving it some Sun Ra… and finally a delirious, twenty-minute, desert-island-disc version of Hang Up Your Hang Ups, funky as anything.

Takin’ Off, My Point Of View, Inventions & Dimensions, Speak Like A Child, The Prisoner.

Classical, no-frills, piano-trio jazz, recorded in 1977 in San Francisco, though released only in Japan at the time. VSOP without horns; more hard-bitten and introspective.
With Ron Carter and Tony Williams in Milestones and four Herbies, including a gnarled Speak Like A Child.

His second LP, originally released by FMP in 1976. ‘Microtonal string investigations still beguiling and fresh four decades later.’

‘Originally released on FMP in 1973, the debut album by this legendary German guitar improviser and instrument inventor is a resonant and hilarious document of the nascent genius recording his peculiar and wondrous music alone in a studio. Acoustic and unfiltered electric guitars turned back into the supremely malleable instruments they were before they’d been firmly encoded as tools for rock or pop or jazz. Reichel uses a homemade 11-string guitar (with three pickups) for all the tunes except the first one. Reichel is like an improvising Harry Partch, investigating the genesis of lute music.’

‘Subtitled ‘some more guitar solos’; his fourth and final record of solo guitar works. Next Reichel would turn much of his attention to the bowed wooden-tongued instrument he created called the daxophone. Reichel recorded the six tracks at his home in Wuppertal in April, 1981, and in the process made what might be his masterpiece. These are not just some more guitar solos. Concentrating largely on acoustic guitar with no frets as well as his electric pick-behind-the-bridge guitar, he transforms tones into crystalline formations — patience with resonances, attention to silence, formation of symmetries around a common sonic point, jetting notes that arc and spread and then hover. One might look for other references to describe what Reichel is up to — the magic of Terje Rypdal, the aura of early William Ackerman, the eccentric multiple pickups of Fred Frith — but really this is unique in guitar repertoire. Reichel built his instruments as tools for improvised exploration, and then he dove deep into them, never so far as on tracks like Could Be Nice or the quivering Southern Monologue, or the two brilliant versions of the title track, Bonobo Beach. On Two Small Pieces Announced by a Cigar-Box, the titular box is bowed in a vocal manner that portends Reichel’s development of the daxophone.
‘A beautiful, essential document from one of the great outsider guitarists of all time.’

Big-hearted, wonderful album from 1972, which combines funk with Aylerized gospel and free and soul jazz, without any of them losing out.

The superb bebop pianist versioning the Jackson 5 — from his Greasy Kid Stuff LP in 1970, with Idris Muhammad, Lee Morgan, Hubert Laws and Buster Williams.
Sister Janie by Funk Inc on the flip — with James Brown’s Sex Machine its point of departure.

Fiery, bluesy, gospelized post-Coltrane bebop; blowing in from Texas, massive like Rollins. From 1975, this is one of the outstanding jazz records of that decade, and Harper’s best, with trumpeter Virgil Jones (who you know from sessions with Roland Kirk, Charles Tolliver and McCoy Tyner), pianist Joe Bonner (Pharoah Sanders, Harold Vick, Khan Jamal), David Friesen on bass and Malcolm Pinson on drums.

Hard bop burners and heart-melting ballads by a crack band including the great drummer Phil Seamen, and bassist Coleridge Goode, an anchor-man of our own London Is The Place For Me series.
‘Joe plays so fiercely on the record that at times it seems as though he’s about to blow his alto apart’ (Coleridge Goode).
‘Shepherd’s Serenade… always a big one! Great reissue’ (Gilles Peterson).
Newly mastered; with extended notes.

‘Absolutely essential,’ says All About Jazz.

‘Perhaps the best representation of a typical Joe Harriott Quintet gig of the period, combining as it does straight-ahead tracks with his free-form work… it opens with the easy swing of Morning Blue with Harriott’s alto warm, sunny and optimistic and Shake Keane’s flugelhorn light as air… Count Twelve is pure bebop rooted in the blues with some simply lovely flugelhorn from Keane and delightful piano from Pat Smythe. The relationship between Goode and drummer and Bobby Orr here is almost symbiotic, while Harriott’s own solo is wild and free-flowing.
‘Michael Garrick’s quirky Face in the Crowd follows. It’s a fine, angular performance that sits well with Harriott’s own more abstract writing. Revival is one of the saxophonist’s most Caribbean-inflected tunes and is perhaps the record’s highlight, whilst Garrick’s Blues On Blues reveals perfectly how very, very good this group really was.
‘The album concludes with three tracks: Spaces, arguably the most abstract piece Harriott ever recorded; the fine, if mainstream bop Spiritual Blues, with some great bowed bass from Goode and excellent drums from Bobby Orr; and the album’s title track has an intensity not found in all of Harriott’s free form work. It’s a stunning group tour de force, again building from comparatively simple melodic materials into something that is dark, brooding and even slightly unsettling.’

‘First issued in 1985 by Hal Willner’s Shemp label. With its unconventional lineup featuring steel drums, Latin percussion, and French horns, along with the co-leaders’ drum-kit and piano, it is among the most wonderful outings of its decade. Pullen was in top form, his inside-outside approach to the keyboard perhaps optimally heard on the exuberant Double Arc Jake, where the bright melody suddenly breaks into pieces, snapping back into miraculous shape. The band includes Hamiet Bluiett on baritone saxophone and Ricky Ford on tenor saxophone, along with Buster Williams on bass, Francis Hayes on steel pans, and a special brass section led by Sharon Freeman on the seventeen-minute Goree.’

The first time out for this near-mythical recording by the co-founder of the Tribe label.
Funky, spiritual jazz, with Phil Ranelin, Harold McKinney, Kareem Harris and the crew, in 1975.
Decent booklet, too, with a history of the label, and never-before-seen archival photos and rare ephemera from its mid-1970s heyday.