Doug Carn - Infant Eyes (2021 Black Jazz Records Reissue Vinyl LP)

Doug Carn - Infant Eyes | Vinyl LP - 2021 Black Jazz Records/Real Gone Music Reissue (RGM-1235, remastered by Mike Milchner)

Infant Eyes was Doug Carn's first record for Black Jazz, and it set the template for everything that followed. Carn plays piano, electric piano and organ throughout, but the record's real trick is what he does with other people's tunes: he took pieces by John Coltrane, Wayne Shorter, Bobby Hutcherson and Horace Silver and wrote his own lyrics into four of them, handing the results to his then-wife Jean Carn to sing. She's on most of the tracks here. On the brief opener "Welcome," the band builds to a crescendo before she enters with a wordless vocal, and by "Infant Eyes" and "Acknowledgement" (the "A Love Supreme" movement) she's turned Coltrane and Shorter's melodies into something closer to art song than instrumental jazz. The one Carn original on the record, "Moon Child," fits comfortably alongside them. Behind the couple, George Harper's tenor and flute, Bob Frazier's trumpet and Al Hall Jr.'s trombone fill out arrangements dense enough to sound like a small orchestra, while the rhythm section marked recording debuts for both drummer Michael Carvin and bassist Henry Franklin.

Real Gone Music has been steadily working through the Black Jazz Records catalogue since 2020, and this reissue of Infant Eyes came out in 2021, within a few weeks of Carn's third Black Jazz album, Revelation. Mike Milchner remastered it at Sonic Vision Mastering, Gordon Anderson produced the reissue, and Pat Thomas wrote new liner notes: he's the author of Listen, Whitey!, a study of the Black Power politics that run through this record. This reissue is limited to 500 copies on blue with black swirl vinyl.