The FIRST Jazz-Rock Fusion Album

 

THE FREE SPIRITS Out of Sight and Sound

Recorded for ABC Records by the legendary jazz team of Rudy Van Gelder and Bob Thiele sometime late in 1966 (the band members had only started hanging out in June, soon jamming--mostly at a Manhattan club called Scene which was located near the theater district. (The band members claim that they performed a total of perhaps 30 times.) The release of The Free Spirits' album, entitled Out of Sight and Mind, occurred in early 1967, probably in January. Though considering himself a protégé of Gábor Szabó, The Free Spirits was Larry Coryell's first New York City band since his move from Seattle in 1965. Though all of the band members had backgrounds in playing jazz music (especially drummer Bob Moses and excepting Coryell's friend Columbus "Chip" Baker), Larry Coryell steered their music toward the electrified free-form chaos that rock and roll was moving toward. (Artists like The Beatles, Bob Dylan, The Kinks, The Rolling Stones, The Byrds, and The Yardbirds were already making their impact on music and pop culture; The Who and Jimi Hendrix had not yet broken into the public eye).
     The band was over-the-moon excited to get Thiele and Van Gelder as producer and engineer, respectively--two legends behind many of the greatest jazz records in history--but the generation gap, with its Old Guy "expert/experience" attitude versus Young artist "enthusiasm," made the experience a nightmare, resulting in a near-consensus opinion that it failed miserably in their goal of capturing their dynamic live sound. Even before recording, Thiele and ABC had determined that the Spirits were going to be making a pop album (every music other than jazz was probably classified as "pop") and had thus locked in a 3-minute maximum length restriction for each song. The result was a very contentious record-making experience--and an album that all four of the band members hated immediately (and attested as such throughout their lives).
     The less-than-satisfactory result (the boys had been in the habit of routinely jamming on a single song for up to 15-minutes at a time) is the main reason why everyone in the band strongly recommends the interested listener to seek out the 2011 release of the tapes that were made Live at the Scene February 22, 1967, for a more accurate representation of the band's music and energy. Any listener to the material captured from this live concert will certainly confirm that this feels like a totally different band (and music) than the stuff on Out of Sight and Sound--that a jazz element is definitely strongly present in the band's live sound. Still, Out of Sight and Sound is unquestionably a ground-breaking aural and emotional experience

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