John Klemmer - Waterfalls (1978 Japanese ABC Impulse! Vinyl LP)

John Klemmer - Waterfalls | Vinyl LP - 1978 Japanese ABC Impulse! Reissue (YS-8511-AI, Cross Over Jazz series, Nippon Columbia)

Waterfalls is the record that turned the Echoplex into a jazz instrument. John Klemmer was among the first saxophonists to run his horn through the tape-echo unit, and on this 1972 date, recorded live at the Ash Grove in Los Angeles and sweetened afterwards in the studio, he uses it to build something genuinely new: long, reverberating tenor and soprano lines that trail off into space, the musical equivalent of ripples spreading across still water. Behind him is a strong electric band, Mike Nock on Fender Rhodes, Wilton Felder of the Crusaders on bass, Eddie Marshall on drums and Victor Feldman on percussion, and the mood is loose, warm and hazy, psychedelic jazz with the lights down low. Klemmer wrote all eight pieces, and the two "Waterfall" themes and the long "Utopia: Man's Dream" are the heart of it. It is atmospheric, trippy, and unlike almost anything else on Impulse! at the time, a record that has quietly gathered a devoted following in the years since.

Klemmer would later become one of the architects of smooth jazz, and his mid-seventies mood records sold in numbers this one never did, but Waterfalls belongs to the adventurous phase before all that, and it is the album the crate-diggers and electric-jazz obsessives keep coming back to. There is a nice detail buried in the credits, too: the Fender Rhodes is played by Mike Nock, the New Zealand-born pianist who would go on to become one of the central figures in Australian jazz.

This copy is the 1978 Japanese reissue on ABC Impulse!, part of the Cross Over Jazz series, manufactured by Nippon Columbia, catalogue number YS-8511-AI.