Pushing on from his soul-jazz accomplishments — classic burners like Steppin’ Out for Blue Note, with Grant Green — this a terrific set of personal, spiritual funky jazz, self-produced in 1974 (when Vick was working for Aretha). The six original compositions are fully flavoured by an expanded horn section — including Charles Earland’s trumpeter Virgil Jones, and French horn player Kiane Zawadi, fresh from Shepp’s Attica Blues — and the Fender Rhodes of Joe Bonner, in from Pharoah Sanders’ group, and Oneness Of Juju. Vick himself is on fire.
Terrific big band music from 1970. What a lineup— built around a core of Tolliver, Stanley Cowell, Cecil McBee and Jimmy Hopps, but also featuring all-time greats like Clifford Jordan, Jimmy Heath and Curtis Fuller.
CP came through professionally in the 1940s, most notably with Dizzy Gillespie. Amongst scores of recordings, he’s on Randy Weston’s Uhuru Afrika, Kenny Dorham’s Afro Cuban, and Baritones And French Horns, with Trane. Here, leading a seriously distinguished lineup — Dorham, Albert Kuumba Heath, Wynton Kelly and Wilbur Ware, produced by Clifford Jordan — he naturally brings his own retrospective gravitas to the late-sixtes jazz ferment, underlined by his opening each side here with tributes: Martin Luther King, with its strongly Milesian lines, and Slide Hampton, featuring some scintillating piano work. Both Dorham and Kelly died between the recording and release of this album — which honours Eric Dolphy, also recently deceased — and the music itself poignantly hinges together different eras in jazz, proposing new paths forward in the tight funk of Girl, You Got A Home, and rollicking Carib jazz of Flying Fish, to close. No bells and whistles; just lovely stuff.