Julian Priester Pepo Mtoto - Love, Love

Julian Priester had played trombone for Sun Ra, Max Roach and Duke Ellington before Herbie Hancock pulled him into the Mwandishi sextet. Love, Love, recorded in 1973 and released on ECM the following year, is what he did once he had a label's budget and nobody telling him to keep it short.

Each side is a single continuous piece. Priester plays alto, tenor and bass trombone plus baritone horn, flute and synthesizers. Pat Gleeson, the man who put the synthesizers into Mwandishi, co-produces and plays them here too. Bill Connors is on guitar and Bayeté on piano and clavinet, with two rhythm sections splitting the record between them: Ndugu Leon Chancler and Henry Franklin across most of it, Eric Gravatt and Ron McClure on the title piece. Cut at Different Fur in San Francisco.

It is one of the strangest entries in the early ECM catalogue, far closer to the electric murk of Hancock's Sextant than to anything else the label was putting out at the time, and listeners have been catching up with it ever since.

Original 1974 US ECM pressing, catalog ECM 1044.

Used copy: VG+ vinyl / VG+ sleeve