Wendell Harrison & Phil Ranelin - A Message From The Tribe (2022 Now-Again Vinyl LP)

Wendell Harrison & Phil Ranelin - A Message From The Tribe | Vinyl LP - 2022 Now-Again reissue (NA 5209, Tribe PRSD 2226)

Tribe was a Black-owned, artist-run collective that grew up in Detroit in the early 1970s, founded by the trombonist Phil Ranelin and the saxophonist Wendell Harrison. Like Strata-East in New York, it was built on self-determination: the musicians ran their own label, put out a magazine and promoted their own concerts, keeping control of the work and the message. A Message from the Tribe was the record that announced them. It moves between spiritual jazz and hard jazz-funk, electric piano and horns underpinning Ranelin's trombone and Harrison's tenor, with the Detroit trumpet elder Marcus Belgrave in the section and Jeamel Lee singing. The politics are right there in the titles: "Angela's Dilemma" for the imprisoned Angela Davis, "How Do We End All Of This Madness". It is music of its moment, urgent and searching, and it has aged into one of the most sought-after documents of the whole artist-run jazz movement.

Original Tribe pressings are among the great rarities in jazz collecting, changing hands for four figures when they surface at all, which for years put this music out of most people's reach. The reissue programme has changed that, and the spiritual jazz revival of the last decade, the same wave that carried Pharoah Sanders and Alice Coltrane back to a young audience, has pulled Tribe along with it.

This is the 2022 Now-Again edition, drawn from the label's Story of Tribe Records project, with lacquers cut by Bernie Grundman, an affordable and well-made way into a record that used to be almost impossible to own.