2022 Stock  Essential! This is the landmark album that forever put saxophonist Joe Harriott on the map. The West Indian-born alto saxophonist Joe Harriott was one of the most convincing boppers outside of the USA at a time when the music was still fresh, though by the end of the 1950s he was exploring freer musical pastures, and the quintet with which he undertook the exploration was an outgrowth of the hard bop band with which he'd made a name on the British scene. As the 1960s progressed, Harriott also proved himself to be something of a pioneer in the fusion field, in the way he fused jazz and classical Indian music. Often in the past the group's music, in which trumpet and flugelhorn player Shake Keane figured alongside Harriott in the front line, has been compared with that of the early Ornette Coleman quartets, but here it's far more interactive, a fact borne out most obviously by the lack of soloists.

This makes for a far more organic music than anything Coleman's group was putting out at the time. Here on Free Form (1961) is where the rhythm of that indigenously West Indian form is extraordinarily maintained in the midst of characteristic group exchanges.