Trio of Doom

VINYL FORMAT. 180-gram vinyl! Certainly the potential of a recording by this trio featuring guitarist John McLaughlin and drummer Tony Williams (both members of Lifetime with organist Larry Young) along with bassist Jaco Pastorius -- aka the Trio of Doom -- is enormous. This compilation contains a performance of the trio at the Havana Jam in 1979, a U.S. State Department-sponsored cultural tour by a large number of American musicians who played on the same stage as Cuban aces. The band rehearsed and had about 25 minutes on the stage. Five days after leaving Cuba, the band reconvened in a New York City studio and recut most of the tracks. The studio versions (cuts six, seven, and ten) were released on a pair of various-artists compilations from the Cuban concert. McLaughlin felt at the time that the live performances were unusable because of Pastorius' playing. He relates the details in brief in the liner notes by Bill Milkowski. What this means, of course, is that out of ten cuts here, seven have never been released before. That said, the sum total of all the music that the group cut together is a little less than 40 minutes. From this, the opening drum solo by Williams takes up nearly three, and 20 seconds is of an alternate take of the drummer's "Para Oriente." But this is not a dodgy rip simply assembled to make money from the stuff of myth. Well, it is designed to make money from myth, but there is some seriously intense music here. -allmusic.com