Jackie McLean - Demon's Dance (Blue Note Tone Poet Vinyl LP)

Jackie McLean - Demon's Dance | Vinyl LP - Blue Note Tone Poet Series Reissue (BST-84345, all-analogue, mastered by Kevin Gray)

Jackie McLean recorded three albums for Blue Note in 1967. The first, New and Old Gospel, featured Ornette Coleman playing trumpet. The second, 'Bout Soul, had Rashied Ali, fresh from John Coltrane's final band, on drums. Demon's Dance, cut in December, pulled back from both. McLean kept LaMont Johnson and Scotty Holt, the pianist and bassist who'd played on New and Old Gospel, but brought in Jack DeJohnette, who'd built his reputation in Charles Lloyd's quartet, and the 22-year-old Woody Shaw, who'd already appeared on Blue Note sessions with Horace Silver and Larry Young but was still a few years from recording under his own name. The six tracks split evenly between McLean's own tunes, Shaw's writing and two compositions by Cal Massey. Massey was a Philadelphia trumpeter and composer whose pieces turned up on records by Coltrane, Archie Shepp and Lee Morgan; his "Message From Trane," the album's closer, is a bright, swinging blues tribute to Coltrane, who had died five months before this session. Shaw's "Sweet Love Of Mine" works a bossa feel that sits unexpectedly well against the angular post-bop of everything else, and the title track opens the record at a hard charge.

Blue Note shelved the album until October 1970, by which point the cover art worked in its favour: Mati Klarwein's painting looks like a cousin of the artwork he did for Miles Davis's Bitches Brew, released the same year. Leonard Feather wrote the original liner notes and Francis Wolff produced and photographed the session. This Tone Poet reissue was mastered from the original analogue tapes by Kevin Gray at Cohearent Audio, supervised by Joe Harley, and pressed at RTI on 180g vinyl. The gatefold jacket is printed by Stoughton.