Recorded on September 10, 1964, prior to his well-known association with John Coltrane, this eponymous album (later renamed Pharoah's First) is the debut release of the iconic tenor saxophonist.(Yes, there are some spelling oddities here: the artist -- birth name Ferrell -- only later changed the spelling from the standard Pharaoh to the more personalized Pharoah.)With one foot in mainstream jazz -- pianist Jane Getz had played with Charles Mingus -- and the other, tentatively at times, in the avant-garde, this is a fascinating glimpse of Sanders's style before he wielded the unremitting fierceness of his playing with Coltrane and the modal mysticism of his later solo albums on Impulse. Interestingly, in recent years he has deployed a more polished version of this sort of vant-flavored bop, bringing his career full circle and strongly suggesting that the hybrid heard here was not due to any failure of nerve on his debut but rather was the cornerstone of his conception.ESP-Disk' has issued this album under three different covers, for its 21st-century reissue on vinyl, we have chosen to use the second and most beautiful. It is augmented with liner notes by a current ESP-Disk' artist, tenor saxophonist Ras Moshe Burnett of The Red Microphone, who can be hear accompanying Amina Baraka on their eponymous 2017 release More

Australian Michael Ozone, currently operating out of Melbourne, is an artist embodying the purest form of absurdist energy. This debut offering, is but of a fraction of the entertainment we can expect as his career zig-zags forward. "Perfect Systems" is a tuff native track based on the idea of man-made tools, technology and borrowed languages. Imagine failed cities overtaken by jungle life as you're swallowed by this utopian island groove. A not-so-distant relative on side-b, "Hetrotopia" leads us on a nomadic journey, exploring vast new landscapes and uncharted territories. References to New Beat and Horror soundtracks are apparent, but no matter what fantasies we infer from Ozone's music, his talent for crafting such fiction is a welcome addition to the ESP institute More