Gene Harris

The title is a contradiction. Despite the name, neither Andrew Simpkins nor Bill Dowdy appear anywhere on this record. Instead, Harris walked into A&R Studios in New York with Ron Carter on bass, Cornell Dupree on guitar, and Wade Marcus writing the charts, and the result sounds like a different musician entirely. The piano is still Harris, but the context around it has shifted to groove-based funk-jazz with electric guitar textures and conga patterns that belong to a different decade.

It works better than you might expect. Harris always had deep blues in his fingers, and the funkier settings give that quality a new platform. Dupree's guitar work is understated and precise, Carter plays electric bass on several tracks with his usual authority, and the percussion section keeps everything moving. The arrangements are professional and slick without being soulless.

As a transition record it does its job. You can hear Harris working out what a solo career sounds like when the trio format is no longer the default.

Recorded at Motown's studio in Detroit, this double LP is the most ambitious and the most uneven of the solo Blue Note records. Harris plays piano and arranges throughout, working with a stripped-down rhythm section of John Hatton on bass and Carl Burnett on drums. The trio format should feel familiar, but the production has that early-seventies warmth that Motown's studio imparted to everything recorded there.

The ambition is the problem and the appeal. Spread across four sides, the album has room for everything: extended blues workouts, quiet ballads, funky vamps, and moments where Harris simply plays beautifully over a spare rhythm. There is no editor here, and the result sprawls. But the best passages remind you why Blue Note kept investing in him: nobody else on the roster played piano with this particular combination of gospel weight and rhythmic swagger.

Treat it as a sampler rather than a statement. The highlights are genuinely good, even if the album as a whole could have been tighter at single-LP length.

This is the one. Astral Signal is the album where Harris's solo reinvention fully arrives, and the reason is Jerry Peters. Peters arranged and produced, bringing in David T. Walker on guitar, Chuck Rainey on bass, Harvey Mason on drums, and a horn section featuring Oscar Brashear and Ernie Watts. The result is pure mid-seventies LA funk-jazz, beautifully recorded, with Harris's blues piano riding on top of grooves that snap and breathe.

Walker's guitar tone is unmistakable, that clean, singing sound he brought to Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder sessions. Paired with Rainey's metronomic bass and Mason's crisp drums, the rhythm section alone is worth the price of admission. Harris responds to the luxury of this setting by playing with more abandon than usual, stretching into longer phrases and leaning harder into the gospel side of his vocabulary.

The album has been rediscovered by crate-diggers and sample hunters, and deservedly so. It belongs in any collection of mid-seventies jazz-funk.

Nexus doubles down on the Astral Signal formula but adds strings and a bigger ensemble, and the extra density does not help. Jerry Peters returns as arranger, Chuck Rainey stays on bass, and Lee Ritenour replaces David T. Walker on guitar, but the production feels more calculated this time, less spontaneous. Where Astral Signal had space for Harris to stretch, Nexus tends to fill every corner with arrangement.

There are good moments buried in the orchestration. Harris's piano still cuts through when the charts let him breathe, and Rainey's bass lines are as solid as ever. But the string writing, while competent, pushes the music toward background jazz territory. The album is pleasant and professional, the kind of record you put on at a dinner party, but it lacks the visceral punch of its predecessor.

If Astral Signal is the essential document of this period, Nexus is the well-intentioned sequel that proves the formula had limits.

The most star-studded session of the solo era, and the one that most clearly reveals how deep Harris's connections to the LA studio world had become. Verdine White and Philip Bailey from Earth, Wind & Fire, Al McKay on guitar, James Gadson and Harvey Mason splitting drum duties, Merry Clayton and Deniece Williams on vocals, Azar Lawrence on tenor saxophone. Jerry Peters again produces and arranges. The album was recorded in four sessions across two weeks at Total Experience Studios in LA.

The performances are excellent. Lawrence's tenor is muscular and searching, a different energy from the horn section players on the earlier records. Harris plays with conviction, and the rhythm section, anchored by Rainey and Mason on the strongest tracks, gives everything a buoyant, dancing quality. The vocal tracks are the weakest element, pushing the album toward smooth territory, but the instrumental passages are the best Harris committed to tape in this period.

Not a perfect album, but the peaks are high enough to justify the whole enterprise.

The final album of the Blue Note solo era, and the one that pushes furthest from jazz into pure funk and R&B territory. Jerry Peters arranges again, and the big addition is Donald Byrd on trumpet for several tracks, fresh from his own Blue Note funk reinvention. A string section fills out the arrangements, and Harris plays synthesizer and electric piano alongside his acoustic instrument.

As a jazz record, Tone Tantrum is the weakest of the six. Harris's piano is often buried under production, and the vocal tracks tilt the balance away from improvisation toward something closer to a D.J. Rogers R&B record with a jazz pianist sitting in. But as a document of its era, it has a certain charm. The grooves are genuine, the string writing is lush without being saccharine, and when Harris does get space to play, his blues vocabulary remains intact.

After Tone Tantrum, Harris retreated from recording for nearly three years. When he came back, it would be on his own terms, with a return to the acoustic trio and quartet formats that suited him best. The LA funk-jazz experiment was over, and the Concord years were about to begin.