condition (record/cover): NM / EX (tag on front)
A Texan tenor player who came through Gil Evans, Art Blakey, Elvin Jones, Max Roach and Lee Morgan's last band, and who has spent fifty years playing a music of enormous physical and spiritual conviction that the American industry never knew what to do with. Billy Harper's records were mostly made in Europe and Japan for that reason. The Awakening comes from the French Marge label, and it has everything that makes him a cult figure: modal structures that build for ten minutes without repeating, a gospel-derived sense of climax, and a tenor tone that is huge, hard and entirely his own.
Original French Marge pressing. Deep, serious, criminally under-documented, and long a staple of the spiritual jazz underground.
