Description
LP - Standard Edition Black Vinyl.
Julius Hemphill's debut record reissued with original artwork via Superior Viaduct. Featuring Hemphill, Baikida Carroll, Abdul Wadud and Phillip Wilson ? a classic jazz front line/rhythm section format, but nothing conventional about the way the music sounds.
"The long track ? from where the LP takes its title ? is one of the key epic statements of new jazz in the era. Among its remarkable distinctions, it manages to draw on Wilson's schizoid experience having been a member of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and the first drummer for the Art Ensemble of Chicago, in making an 11/8 rhythm into a staggeringly funky thing of joy. Over the course of fourteen and a half minutes, Hemphill builds a nearly continuous solo, his spiritual blood brother Wadud sawing the cello with a deep blues soulfulness that is raw and mantra-like in its repetitive incantation. It feels right and wrong in equal measure, the theme carrying its own piquancy with honked barnyard dissonances and some contrary motion between the horns and string. Most of all, it takes its own sweet time, in no hurry to get anywhere in particular, but out for a righteous stroll."
? John Corbett (excerpt from the liner notes)
