Date: September 3-4, 1966 (recording)
Release: Atlantic #SD 1482
Cover Art: view / download
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“The purpose of art is mystery.”
—René Magritte
Not even relegated to the shadowy status of cult figure, Jamaican-born alto saxophonist Joe Harriott remains virtually unknown today. A key influence in the British free-jazz movement of the early ’60s, Harriott’s adventurous style earned him unfavorable comparisons with Ornette Coleman, even though he was far more boppishly swinging than his volatile American counterpart ever was. An unsung pioneer in the union of Eastern and Western music, Harriott began experimenting with Indian musical forms in the mid ’60s, incorporating its distinctive structures and rhythmic patterns into a jazz framework.
Harriott soon merged his working quintet with a five-piece Indian ensemble headed up by Calcutta composer, conductor, and violin master (he played in the London Philharmonic) John Mayer, co-leading this Indo-jazz “double quintet” until his untimely death in 1973. While the Joe Harriott-John Mayer Double Quintet certainly did not invent the mixing of jazz andIndian music (Ravi Shankar and Bud Shank were doing it in 1961), they were the very first group to use the term “fusion” in identifying their sound (don’t blame them…they only gave the genre its F-word name, not its derogatory connotation). Artists of the highest order, they were able to fully evoke the mystery of the East within a solid jazz context, a feat few contemporary jazz and world musicians have matched.
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