One of my long-lost vinyl albums, I despaired of ever hearing Charles Tolliver's high wire album Impact again. But eMusic has come through and added this ultra-aggressive early 1970s album, recorded live at the Domicile, to its catalogue. It captures the trumpeter with the scintillating rhythm section of pianist Stanley Cowell, bassist Ron Matthewson and drummer Alvin Queen — all of them young (at the time) and full of fire. Cowell, one of the unsung giants of jazz in the last forty years, is particularly riveting, playing just beyond the range of his complete control, moving all over the keyboard — suggesting, adding, disrupting, agitating, never letting the music stagnate. Longtime exile Queen is exactly the right drummer for this kind of date. He's on top of the time, playing very assertively, essentially corroborating everything that Cowell does. Matthewson's role is to lock things down, which he does with absolute sureness.

The players all tear out of the starting gate with the title track, a furious 7/4 vamp delivered with knife-fine precision. 7/4 time was never so funky. Cowell hammers his solo, mirrored every step of the way by Queen. Tolliver, generally a harmonically sophisticated linear player, abandons his… read more »