Solid Bond
by Graham Bond

As everyone knows, Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker first played together in the Graham Bond Organization, then they left and formed Cream with Clapton and left Bond in their dust. People might be drawn to this album for the wrong music--the Bruce and Baker material, with John McLaughlin of all people tagging along.

But the 1963 sessions with that lineup, the last three tracks (well, tracks 4,5 and 12 as listed above, but they're the last track of side 3 and all of side 4 on the LP) are really for Graham Bond completists only. They're jazz explorations--these musicians all started in jazz and later moved to the blues and rock. As they moved to rock and roll, keeping their jazz chops available if needed, they matured as musicians, and these tracks are before that. They're very young in those 1963 tracks, and they hadn't found their hard, heavy, bluesy stride that they would show--in flashes--on The Sound Of '65 and the album after that.

But the other tracks are a different matter, the 1966 material with Jon Hiseman on drums and the mighty Dick Heckstall-Smith playing sax, sometimes two saxes at a time. This is one of the best places to hear the power and magic of Graham Bond, a born music maker. You get to hear his jazz prowess, his blues soul, his quirky and very personal songwriting, the whole thing.

Graham Bond was not a good man. He was a pedophile, as was revealed long after his death by his biographer Harry Shapiro, he molested his wife's daughter; this was a pattern. He made the world a better place by killing himself in 1974; he stepped in front of a train in London. The story makes some of the lyrics here more than a little hard to listen to, definitely an obstacle to entry for many people. He put it all right in there.

But he was a true blues man, he never played a tune that wasn't soulful. He never quite got his potential fully on wax, but the 1966 tracks are one of the places he came closest.