 Charles Earland This one should be fucking incredible, and the fact that it's merely dammnnn good is not that big of a disappointment. You really can't go wrong with a 70s Charles Earland album; Intensity was recorded in 1972 and is a burning album of organ grooves with the fat guy himself riding the mighty Hammond. Man, he could fucking play that thing. Just listen, it sounds like he's choking the damn thing! This is great stuff. Why should it have been better than it is? As you can see from the subtitle tacked on to the CD reissue, this version of Intensity is being marketed on the strength of Lee Morgan's presence in the band, and the fact that the session was recorded two days before Lee was gunned down by his girlfriend. As it's the great trumpeter's last session, you want it to contain some piercing, searching solos, some kind of last gasp of brilliance before he was taken away from us forever. Not so. In fact, Lee is so much a non-presence on this session that it's almost misleading to play him up so much. He plays as part of a 4-piece trumpet section and only takes a few solos, so his personality is hardly imprinted on the album in any lasting way. Even on the one Morgan tune, "Speedball," guitarist Maynard Parker takes by far the better solo. All that said, it kind of plays into the fact that Lee was killed shortly thereafter that his playing was unmemorable here. He feels like a ghost presiding over the session – it sounds more like the band is playing for Lee than with him. So you've been notified, this ain't Lee's gig. It's Earland's all the way, and he plays like a motherfucker throughout. The tunes are mostly pop tunes that show an interesting re-crossover from jazz-pop back into jazz: Earland tackles no less than two songs by Chicago ("Happy 'Cause I'm Goin' Home" and "Lowdown," which the liner notes erroneously credit to Boz Scaggs, who had a hit with it a few years later). Those are not Chicago songs I know well, but man, he plays the hell out of 'em. "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow," improbably," finds a groove – that is one song that is impossible to kill. There's a pair of Earland originals ("'Cause I Love Her" and "Morgan") in the typical ten-plus minute range, and the band is smokin'. Billy Cobham's on drums, Hubert Laws on flute, a bunch of othe rguys I've not heard of fill the band up to a 12-piece. It's a big sound, but very tight and verrry groovin'. This CD version adds two tracks from the Charles III LP that was released after Intensity, but all the material is from the same session, so it makes more sense compiled this way. If you like Earland's more well-known Black Talk! , this is a great other disc to snatch up. If you don't like that album, you must be some kind of monster. If you haven't ever heard of it, why, I just don't even want you in the same world as me.
Review by Sweaty Prince |