Following striking contributions to Jackie McLean’s One Step Beyond (1963) and Eric Dolphy’s Out To Lunch (1964), two of Blue Note’s most ground-breaking releases, Bobby Hutcherson’s first four releases as a leader at the label from 1965 onwards, Dialogue, Components, Happenings and Stick-Up!, revealed an increasingly strong vibes stylist whose four-mallet fluidity, articulation and broad sound palette traversed hard-bop and avant-garde, balancing fire and harmonic subtlety with adventurous imagination.

His 1969 follow up, Total Eclipse, marked not only the beginning of an undervalued four-year collaboration with West Coast-based, former Clifford Brown/Max Roach Quintet tenor player Harold Land, then influenced in part by Coltrane, but also Chick Corea’s first Blue Note session following his label debut, Now He Sings, Now He Sobs.

Alongside regular drum partner Joe Chambers and incoming bassist Reggie Johnson, Hutcherson’s compositions here are still refreshingly forward-looking but tilt less towards the outer edges than his debut that featured Andrew Hill. With Alfred Lion now retired, it’s produced by Francis Wolff and Duke Pearson and recorded at NYC’s Plaza Sound, rather than Rudy Van Gelder’s studio.

The brisk post-bop opener ‘Herzog’ lets fly with Hutcherson and Land in vibrant mood, while the distinctly tone-poem-like title track has a hypnotic, dream-like feel with Corea and Hutcherson building a spare, but decidedly haunting atmosphere. Corea’s ‘Matrix’ shifts from a knotty head into a hard swinging blues where Chambers’ increasingly resourceful dialogue fires up under an expressive Land then explodes with Hutcherson, whose accuracy and invention at speed is on another level. Hutcherson’s complex closer, ‘Pompeian’, sets Land up with a strong waltz-time flute theme echoed by vibes before moving into freer modes with Hutcherson and Chambers dominating the discourse, as they did on Components, before resolving into the leader’s pointillistic bells and Johnson’s arco bass.

An absorbing and adventurous introduction to the Hutcherson/Land quintet that has been out of print since the late 1980s remixed CD and greatly benefits from more robust bass and the presence of Kevin Gray’s mastering from the original analogue tapes, and Tone Poet’s heavyweight vinyl.