Heavy Feel

Joining Larry are Saxophonist George Brooks, Drummer Mike Hughes, and Bassist Matt Montgomery. The album sounds like a collect of Larry's career. Big open sounding tracks like Ghost Note, Polished and Heavy Feel juxtapose tracks like River Crossing and Oasis Path showing Larry's acoustic side. 2011 East Sharing Air and The Way It Was are sure to be radio pleasers. The guitar virtuoso Larry Coryell has had and up and down career. And quite unjustified being overshadowed by others - be it Jimi Hendrix or John Mclaughlin - for most of his long time as a first class musician. Starting of as psychedelic pioneer with Free Spirits and then producing a string of fabuluos jazz/rock albums likeAt the Village Gate and Coryellbefore almost hitting the big time with the splendid Eleventh House. And performing and recording with the likes of Jack Bruce, John Mclaughlin, Carla Bley, Gary Burton. But after that he seemed to loose focus and producing a string of rather dissatisfactory albums - except for some forrays into world music, Larry like McLaughlin always been inspired by Indian music. As one of the pioneers of jazz-rock -- perhaps the pioneer in the ears of some -- Larry Coryell deserves a special place in the history books. He brought what amounted to a nearly alien sensibility to jazz electric guitar playing in the 1960s, a hard-edged, cutting tone, phrasing and note-bending that owed as much to blues, rock and even country as it did to earlier, smoother bop influences. Yet as a true eclectic, armed with a brilliant technique, he is comfortable in almost every style, covering almost every base from the most decibel-heavy, distortion-laden electric work to the most delicate, soothing, intricate lines on acoustic guitar. Unfortunately, a lot of his most crucial electric work from the '60s and '70s is missing on CD, tied up by the erratic reissue schemes of Vanguard, RCA and other labels, and by jazz-rock's myopically low level of status in the CD era (although that mindset is slowly changing)