Billy Harper - Capra Black (1983 Japanese Nippon Columbia Stereo LP)

Vinyl: EX
Sleeve: VG+
Obi: VG+

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Billy Harper - Capra Black | Vinyl LP - 1983 Japanese Nippon Columbia Stereo Reissue with OBI and Insert (YS-7132-AX)

Strata-East was the artist-owned label Charles Tolliver and Stanley Cowell founded in 1971 to release the music the majors wouldn't touch, with musicians retaining ownership of their masters. The catalogue that emerged across the early-to-mid seventies has since become one of the most heavily collected bodies of work in post-war jazz: Tolliver's Music Inc, Cowell's Musa: Ancestral Streams, Clifford Jordan's Glass Bead Games, Pharoah Sanders' Izipho Zam, and this. Billy Harper had spent the late 1960s and early 1970s as one of the most in-demand tenor players in New York. By 1973 he had a book of his own compositions and a clear sense of what he wanted to do with them. The title track stretches past eleven minutes of declamatory, preaching-mode tenor over a rhythm section built for sustained intensity. "Sir Galahad" lifts the modal post-Coltrane vocabulary into something distinctly Harper's own. Side two opens with "Soulfully, I Love You / Black Spiritual of Love", where the five-voice choir (Gene McDaniels among them, the same Gene McDaniels who wrote "Compared to What" and recorded Headless Heroes of the Apocalypse two years earlier) wraps around Harper's tenor in the gospel-leaning mode Donald Byrd had been exploring on the Blue Note records of the previous decade.

Strata-East originals are notoriously hard to find in clean condition because the label's small initial pressings have been hunted for forty years. Japanese pressings filled the gap from early on. Trio licensed the album in 1974, Denon followed in 1978, and Nippon Columbia did this third Japanese edition in 1983, by which point the title was already established as a foundational document of seventies spiritual jazz. The mastering and pressing standards across all three Japanese editions are uniformly high, and this 1983 copy comes complete with the original Nippon Columbia obi strip and insert.