Chico Freeman - The Outside Within (1981 US India Navigation Vinyl LP)

Vinyl: EX
Sleeve: VG+

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

Chico Freeman - The Outside Within | Vinyl LP - 1981 India Navigation (IN 1042)

Chico Freeman was twenty-seven when this was recorded. Son of tenor saxophonist Von Freeman, Freeman grew up in Chicago, and had been recording for India Navigation since 1975. Influenced by the scales of the Far East, but with the warmth and extroverted emotions of the blues, the album is a key title from India Navigation's late 1970s run. The Outside Within was recorded in 1978 but released until 1981. 

The recording session assembled a quartet that would have been difficult to improve: Cecil McBee on bass, Jack DeJohnette on drums and John Hicks on piano. McBee had played with Charles Lloyd, Alice Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders and was the most in-demand bassist in the post-Coltrane tradition. DeJohnette had been inside Miles Davis's Bitches Brew band and was Sam Rivers's drummer, among many others. Hicks, a Bostonian who had worked with Art Blakey, brought warmth and swing to material that could have tipped further into abstraction.

Side A is one piece, "Undercurrent," at approximately twenty minutes. Freeman plays tenor and bass clarinet, the bass clarinet most prominent in the quieter passages where McBee's low bass lines create a slow, searching harmonic floor. The three pieces on Side B move between different registers: "The Search" is the most open and expansive, "Luna" works with odd time signatures over a McBee bass and is superb, and "Ascent" closes the set with more direct hard bop energy. All four compositions are Freeman's. 

This is the original US pressing on India Navigation (IN 1042) released in 1981.