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.’