Hometown: Newark, NJ
First Recordings: 1960s

Personnel:
Alan Shorter -flugelhorn, trumpet, tambourine
Gato Barbieri -tenor saxophone
Charlie Haden, Reggie Nicholson -bass
Muhammad Ali, Rashied Ali -drums

Related Artists :
players on this disc have also performed with John Coltrane , Ornette Coleman, Carla Bley, Old and New Dreams, Pat Metheny, and many more.

Alan Shorter is a marginal but colorful jazz personality who reputedly got booted from a teaching assignment at Bennington college in Vermont for his tastes in recreation and fraternization. This record reveals that he was once also an original musical thinker who applied the vernacular of free jazz to steady grooves and stuttering melodies that were foreign to the language of contemporary outside players.

One of this disc's rewards is the chance it offers to hear great free players like Charlie Haden and brothers Rashied and Muhammad Ali getting just a bit funky. Elsewhere the rhythms give way to driving, meter-less washes of sound and texture that provide a platform for the horn players. Shorter, whose playing bears the imprints of Miles Davis and Don Cherry, is no virtuoso, but his lack of flash puts the spotlight on his eccentric, staccato tunes and the colorful smears he plays behind star soloist Gato Barbieri. The Argentine saxophonist, who had not yet turned into the stylishly cartoonish figure that sold so many records in the 70s, uses his moments in the spotlight to spin out slurred, ululating lines in a gut-wrenchingly vibrato-drenched tone.