One of Italy’s most enduring and adventurous imprints dedicated to jazz, Red Records, returns with the first ever vinyl reissue of their seminal 1982 release, the Ethnic Heritage Ensemble’s “Impressions”. A towering holy grail among fans of spiritual jazz and Chicago’s AACM, encountering the band in their original line up of Kahil El'Zabar, Henry 'Light' Huff, and Ed Wilkerson, its intoxicatingly hypnotic palette of rhythms and tones - drawing on a heady mix of African American and African traditions and instrumentation - remains wholly engrossing and creatively thrilling more than 40 years down the road.

Founded in 1965 in Chicago by Muhal Richard Abrams, Jodie Christian, Steve McCall, and composer Phil Cohran as a means toward the collective “nurturing, performing, and recording serious, original music,” the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians has a legacy, particularly as a means of Afrocentric self-determination, within the avant-garde - traversing jazz, composed, and improvised music - like no other organisation in the United States. The sheer number of significant artists that have counted themselves members - Fred Anderson, Anthony Braxton, the Art Ensemble of Chicago and all of its individual members, Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre, George E. Lewis, Leroy Jenkins, Jeff Parker, Tomeka Reid, Matana Roberts, Wadada Leo Smith, Henry Threadgill, and so many more - simply dazzles the mind. Among the most interesting of these is Kahil El'Zabar, who founded the Ethnic Heritage Ensemble. Active ever since, and cutting a large path through the creative landscape with their endlessly engrossing sounds, they remain one of the most striking bands working today. With their early catalog long out of print and hotly pursued, we’re thrilled to get our hands on copies of Red Records’ long anticipated, first time reissue of their 1982, towering classic “Impressions”. It’s an absolutely engrossing creative excursion at the borders of spiritual jazz, drawing on countless millennia of musicality to produce a hypnotic journey into the abstract realm.

Born in Chicago in 1953, the multi-instrumentalist, percussionist, and composer, Kahil El'Zabar, has been a driving force in American music since he joined the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) during the early 1970s, eventually becoming its chairman in 1975. While El'Zabar has worked in what feels like a countless number of configurations and bands - collaborating with everyone from Dizzy Gillespie, Stevie Wonder, and Nina Simone, to Cannonball Adderley, Paul Simon, Pharoah Sanders, and Billy Bang - the majority of his output over the years has been as a bandleader, most notably of the two groups he founded during the early 1970s: Kahil El'Zabar's Ritual Trio and Ethnic Heritage Ensemble.

With a membership that has included AACM greats like Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre, Joseph Bowie, Ernest Dawkins, Light Henry Huff, Edward Wilkerson, Hanah Jon Taylor, and 'Atu' Harold Murray over its half century of activity, Kahil El'Zabar’s Ethnic Heritage Ensemble ranks, alongside The Art Ensemble of Chicago, as one of the collective’s most enduring “all star” bands, renowned for blending free improvisation with elements drawn from both African and African American traditions into a trance inducing music, grounded by a remarkable sense of open collaboration under El'Zabar’s guidance.

“Impressions”, recorded during June 1981 in Bologna, Italy, and originally issued by the Italian imprint, Red Records, the following year, is the Ethnic Heritage Ensemble’s second full length, following on from the ground established by its predecessor, Three Gentlemen From Chikago, issued by Moers.

Comprising a single work in seven parts that stretches across the album’s two sides, “Impressions” is striking through its instrumentation - Huff and Wilkerson primarily playing reeds (though flute occasionally surfaces and it’s impossible to say who exactly is playing what within the broader palette of sound at any given time) playing counterpoint to El'Zabar’s brilliant percussive dance. Notably, while all of these players began their careers during the 70s within the wilder reaches of free improvisation that was the AACM during that period, at the outset of the 1980s, we encounter the trio forging toward a more delicate and constrained sound, embracing something closer to a balladic pacing for much of the LP, collectively revealing the intricate complexities and energy within the music without sacrificing an ounce of its sophistication.

Hypnotically transportive and pulsing - El'Zabar driving the group forward - as the intoxicating grooves of Huff and Wilkerson’s tonal interplay devolve and reemerge between moments of thrillingly complex abstraction, the Ethnic Heritage Ensemble’s “Impressions” stands among the great artefacts of the 1980s American avant-garde, remaining as seductive and listenable as it is challenging, more than four decades down the road.