Collection: The Visitors

Earl and Carl Grubbs grew up in Philadelphia, learned saxophone from John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy in the direct way that young musicians sometimes got access to their idols in the early 1960s, and formed The Visitors in the early 1970s alongside pianist Joe Bonner, bassist John Lee and drummer Sherman Ferguson, later replaced by Victor Lewis. Four albums followed between 1972 and 1976, all recorded and released before the group quietly disbanded. The first two, "Neptune" and "In My Youth," appeared on Cobblestone, the Muse subsidiary; "Rebirth" and "Motherland" were on Muse proper. The music they made sits in the late-Coltrane lineage without being imitative of it: post-bop modal frameworks opened into extended improvisation, the two horn voices moving in close conversation or drifting apart into open space, the rhythm section providing grounding rather than pulse. "Motherland" (1975, released 1976), produced by Michael Cuscuna and featuring Joe Bonner on piano, John Lee on bass and Victor Lewis on drums, was their last record and is now considered their finest.