Billy Harper Quintet - Love On The Sudan (1977 Japanese Denon Vinyl LP)

Vinyl: EX
Sleeve: VG+
Obi: None

Our grading system explained here.
Photo is of the actual item.

Billy Harper Quintet - Love On The Sudan | Vinyl LP - 1977 Japanese Denon Jazz Original (YX-7568-ND, Nippon Columbia)

By 1977, the American market for this kind of jazz had narrowed almost to nothing. Fusion dominated sales charts, and players working in the modal, spiritual tradition that came out of late-period Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders were finding more receptive audiences in Europe and Japan than at home. Japanese labels stepped into the gap. Denon, East Wind and others funded sessions in New York studios with American musicians, released the albums exclusively in Japan, and kept an entire school of playing alive on record. Love On The Sudan is one of the finest examples. Harper's tenor sound is huge, raw and gospel-rooted. "Awakening" opens the album at a controlled burn, with Hollins's trumpet doubling the melody before Harper takes a solo that builds steadily across nearly seven minutes. "Priestess" stretches past eleven minutes and is the most structured piece here, opening with a bold harmonic sequence that locks Tucker's piano and Hollins's trumpet into a repeating figure before Harper enters and pulls the music apart. The title track fills side B. Seventeen minutes, no break, with Maker and Pinson building a rhythmic undertow that rolls forward in waves while Harper plays with the kind of sustained, high-register intensity that leaves no room for anything half-committed.

Harper had been building towards this. He recorded Capra Black for Strata-East in 1973, then Black Saint for the Italian Black Saint label in 1975. When the Modern Jazz League of Tokyo named Black Saint their jazz record of the year, it confirmed what the Japanese audience already recognised: Harper was playing at a level that his commercial circumstances in the US didn't reflect. Yoshio Ozawa produced the Denon sessions with Jim McCurdy engineering at A&R Studios (Phil Ramone's facility on 48th Street). All three compositions are Harper's own. This is the original 1977 first pressing on Denon Jazz YX-7568-ND, manufactured by Nippon Columbia Co., Ltd. It was the first of four albums Harper would record for the label; Soran-Bushi, B.H. (1978), Knowledge of Self (1979) and The Believer (1980) followed.