Tony Williams Lifetime - Emergency (2xLP on 1xCD) (1969)

Emergency! is the debut double album by American jazz fusion group The Tony Williams Lifetime. It was released in 1969 and was one of the first significant jazz fusion recordings. The album has commonly been regarded as a pioneering, influential, and original album in the jazz, rock, and fusion genres.
According to jazz scholar Christopher Meeder, the Lifetime eschewed the funk influence of Miles Davis' early fusion music with a mixture of heavy rock drumming and the "light, rapid swing" that was Williams' signature. "Emergency! synthesized the best elements of free jazz, modal jazz, and British rock", Meeder wrote, "and added a rhythmic complexity in tracks like 'Via the Spectrum Road,' a blues of sorts in the unusual time signature of 11/8." In Paul Hegarty's opinion, the music was more oriented with progressive music's rock side rather than its jazz, fusing psychedelic elements while featuring "reprises, crescendos, an oscillation between the simpler time signatures of rock and the more progressive metres of jazz". He cited "Via the Spectrum Road" as an example of how Williams' singing approached the "non-rock, non-jazz softness" of progressive rock pioneer Robert Wyatt.
"Via the Spectrum Road" was viewed by Stuart Nicholson as one of the album's most blatant explorations of rock rhythms. "Spectrum", on the other hand, utilized rhythms from post-bop. Composed by guitarist John McLaughlin, it was first recorded for his 1969 Extrapolation debut and was regarded by Nicholson as an extension of that album's "free-flowing approach ... but reinforced by the volume and energy associated with rock".
A mistake during Emergency's production led Meeder to believe it helped lend a "raw power" to the music: "A cynical engineer used to recording mainstream jazz recorded the band carelessly, allowing the tape to distort, unintentionally adding satisfyingly raw edges to the album."
(en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency!_(album)