Horace Tapscott Quintet - The Quintet (2022 Mr Bongo Vinyl LP)

Horace Tapscott Quintet - The Quintet | Vinyl LP - 2022 Mr Bongo Reissue (MRBLP256)

• A previously unreleased 1969 session by one of Los Angeles' most important and unjustly overlooked jazz musicians, recovered from master tapes in the Flying Dutchman archives and released for the first time in 2022 by Mr Bongo
• The exact same quintet as The Giant Is Awakened: Horace Tapscott on piano, Arthur Blythe on alto saxophone, Everett Brown Jr. on drums, and the unusual dual-bass configuration of David Bryant and Walter Savage Jr.
• Produced by Bob Thiele, who had just departed Impulse! Records to found Flying Dutchman in 1969 and brought the same conviction to these sessions that produced the best work of the Impulse! era
  

Horace Tapscott spent most of the 1960s in South Central Los Angeles, leading the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra and building the Underground Musicians Association (UGMA, later renamed the Union of God's Musicians and Artists Ascension), a community organisation that functioned as rehearsal space, arts incubator and social anchor through the years surrounding the 1965 Watts uprising. The Arkestra performed on flatbed trucks through the neighbourhood as the fires burned. The musicians Tapscott nurtured in those years included Arthur Blythe, David Murray, Butch Morris and Stanley Crouch. He declined opportunities to tour nationally or relocate to New York, choosing instead to stay and build something in his own community, which meant that despite being regarded by his peers as one of the most significant pianists in the country, his recording career did not begin until 1969. That debut, The Giant Is Awakened, was produced by Bob Thiele for his newly founded Flying Dutchman imprint, Thiele having just left Impulse! Records where he had produced the definitive John Coltrane catalogue. The session that became The Giant Is Awakened produced enough material for a second album, which Thiele also intended to release. It was not released. The master tapes sat in the Flying Dutchman archives for over fifty years.

What Mr Bongo have recovered and pressed here is three pieces from that same 1969 session, with the same quintet: Tapscott on piano, Arthur Blythe on alto saxophone, Everett Brown Jr. on drums, and the distinctive dual-bass configuration of David Bryant and Walter Savage Jr. that gives the rhythm section its particular weight and density. The lineup contains no trumpet, no trombone and no second horn: just piano, alto saxophone and two basses over drums, a configuration that concentrates the harmonic and rhythmic conversation between Tapscott and his rhythm section in a way that the fuller ensemble of some contemporary free jazz recordings does not. The three tracks are titled "World Peace", "Your Child" and "For Fats", the last almost certainly an elegy for a significant jazz figure whose identity is worth confirming from your sleeve before discussing in any marketing context. Following the release of The Giant Is Awakened, Tapscott did not record again as a leader until the late 1970s through the small Los Angeles labels Interplay and Nimbus. He died in February 1999 at the age of 64. The music on this record was made at his only commercially produced recording session and would not be heard by anyone outside the Flying Dutchman archives for five decades.

Pressed at Optimal Media GmbH, licensed from Flying Dutchman, released 2 September 2022 on Mr Bongo (MRBLP256). Comes in an oversized jacket with plain black poly-lined inner sleeve and obi strip.