condition (record/cover): NM / EX

Insert and obi included.

Somebody had to make the french horn a bebop instrument and Julius Watkins was the only person who ever really managed it. The horn is slow to speak, murderously difficult to play accurately at tempo, and had spent its entire history in the orchestra pit. Watkins played bop lines on it with the fluency of a trumpeter, recorded these sextet sides for Blue Note in the mid-fifties, and then spent the rest of his career as the first call for anyone who wanted that sound - Gil Evans, Charles Mingus, Quincy Jones, hundreds of sessions. Almost no records under his own name.

Japanese Blue Note pressing. A genuine one-off in the history of the instrument.