On a Sunday in the early 70s in South LA, you could easily find yourself standing in a high school auditorium, watching Horace Tapscott conduct the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra as they poured out music like a benediction. No tickets, no VIP list—just the community, gathered. This was music as civic duty, as spiritual practice, as revolution by other means. Live at Widney High December 26th, 1971 captures one such afternoon, previously unreleased and now arriving like a dispatch from a parallel universe where the music mattered more than the money. Recorded at Widney Career Preparatory & Transition Center, a special-education magnet high school in Los Angeles, this performance documents PAPA in full flight—a band that between 1970 and '72 played these weekend shows for free, often sharing the bill with John Carter and Bobby Bradford's group, and at one point the Sun Ra Arkestra itself.

The date was December 26th, the day after Christmas, and the band came to play. What you hear on this record is the sound of a collective at the height of its powers - Horace Tapscott directing traffic, channeling Coltrane and Pharoah, filtering cosmic jazz through the specific gravity of South Central Los Angeles. This wasn't music for the academy or the downtown critics. This was for the people who lived there, who needed it, who understood it without needing liner notes. The album opens with Tapscott's arrangement of Coltrane's "Equinox" - the most forward-thinking jazz player of the time was a consistent inspiration for the Ark, and you can hear it in every bar. Coltrane's searching modal explorations get refracted through PAPA's communal ethos, the horn section speaking in tongues while the rhythm section holds down a groove that feels like earth and sky at once.

"The Creator Has A Master Plan"- Pharoah Sanders' spiritual jazz anthem - gets the full Arkestra treatment. Tapscott's arrangement demonstrates his gift for simplicity, but don't mistake simplicity for ease. The band's fiery pace and feeling turn Sanders' hymn into something urgently present, a call and response that pulls you in whether you're ready or not. The tracklist rounds out with the traditional spiritual "Motherless Child"—rendered here with the kind of aching beauty that connects the dots between gospel, blues, and the avant-garde—and a medley of two compositions by Herbert Baker, one of the Arkestra's young pianists who died in a car accident at age 17. "Little A's Chant" (which some might recall from the previous "60 Years" release) features lyrics written and sung by Linda Hill, while the hypnotic "Flight 17" closes the set like a prayer that hasn't finished being answered.

Baker's presence haunts this record in the best possible way. His compositions, performed here by his peers and mentors, carry the weight of potential unfulfilled—but also the evidence of what was already there, fully formed, before fate intervened. The Arkestra plays these pieces with a combination of tenderness and fire that speaks to their understanding of what was lost. The rhythm section—David Bryant and Richard Herrera on bass, Ernest Cojoe on congas, Everett Brown Jr on drums—provides a foundation that's both rock-solid and fluid, capable of supporting the most out explorations while never losing the groove. The horn section—Al Collins on tenor, Lawrence Douglas (Butch) Morris and Walter Graham on trumpet, Lorenzo Gardman and Lester Robertson on trombone—blazes through Tapscott's arrangements with precision and passion. Kamau Daáood adds "word musician" textures that ground the cosmic in the concrete, the spiritual in the street.

What makes this recording essential isn't just the quality of the playing—though that alone would be enough—but the context. This was community music in the truest sense: made by the community, for the community, with no thought of commercial viability or critical approval. That it sounds this good, this alive, this urgent nearly 55 years later is testament to the vision Tapscott and his collaborators were pursuing. They were building something that would last, even if nobody was paying attention at the time. Recorded by Robert Beckett and Michael Dett Wilcotts, the audio captures the rawness and immediacy of the performance without sacrificing clarity. Wayne Peet's remastering brings out details that might have been buried in lesser hands, while Jay Curry's cover and LP layout, featuring photos by Michael Dett Wilcotts, frame the music in its proper historical and aesthetic context.

This is what Sunday afternoon in South LA sounded like when the Arkestra was in town. This is what free looked like. This is what community sounded like. Put it on and remember—or discover for the first time—what was possible when musicians believed music could change the world, one Sunday at a time.