Return To Forever - Romantic Warrior (1976 Japanese CBS/Sony Vinyl LP)

Return To Forever - Romantic Warrior | Vinyl LP - 1976 Japanese CBS/Sony (25AP 55)

Romantic Warrior is the record where jazz-fusion reached its peak, then quietly ended. By 1976 Return to Forever had settled into its greatest line-up, Chick Corea surrounded by banks of synthesizers, Stanley Clarke on bass, the young Al Di Meola on guitar and Lenny White on drums, and this album is the sound of four virtuosos at the absolute top of their game. It is fusion at its most ambitious and least apologetic, six long compositions built on a loose medieval and fantasy theme, full of hairpin unison lines, sudden shifts of metre and solos that go from the delicate to the ferocious. Corea wrote half of it, including the storming "Medieval Overture" and the eleven-minute "Duel of the Jester and the Tyrant", while Clarke, Di Meola and White each contributed a piece of their own. The playing is dazzling, but the writing keeps it from ever becoming mere display. It went on to be the band's best-selling record, and it remains the album most people mean when they talk about the golden age of fusion.

It was also the end of the road. Romantic Warrior was Return to Forever's last studio album with this line-up, the four of them going their separate ways to hugely successful careers soon after, and the record has come to stand as the high-water mark of the whole electric-fusion movement.

This is the 1976 Japanese CBS/Sony pressing, catalogue number 25AP 55, with the colour-inverted foldout insert made specially for this edition.