Don Ellis knew he was fronting a big band in a brave, post-Kentonesque new era. He had done time with the post-Glenn Miller Glenn Miller Orchestra and had studied his As, Bs and Cs and 1s, 2s and 19s. What he brought to the party was a pail of sonority and rhythmicality wings that hadn't been part of the US jazz diet hitherto. To declare an interest it is the era that produced Don Ellis Orchestra Live at Monterey! and Electric Bath (both 1967) that do it best for me. Ellis' fluency with time-signature compositions created some of the period's most inspirational and most overlooked jazz. True, much was unabashedly, unapologetically intellectual but it swings in ways that others only touched on in dilettante fashion. Of the two releases here Goes Underground (1969) touches me less. It was a more commercially predisposed album than most of his canon. An exception is the foot-knotting horo dance rhythms of ‘Bulgarian Bulge’. Ellis had bought into Bulgarian music, though to my knowledge he never credited the highly influential Nonesuch LPs (unlike non-jazzers like David Crosby Graham Nash and Paul Simon). ‘Bulgarian Bulge’ predates the Bulgarian pianist-composer Milcho Leviev, the musician who turned him on to Bulgarian traditional music, joining the band. The hurdles facing a band packing this number of players are the inevitable trade-offs in the arrangements between the power and density of the collective sound and space or suffocation and air. Consequently, the less fettered spaciness of Fillmore appeal more strongly. The risk-taking ‘Hey Jude’ is a marvellously scored Beatles deconstruction strewn with dissonance, marching rhythms and humour. A cover version it is not. A coda thought There is a definite whiff of Columbiana about these recordings. Label mates Laura Nyro's ‘Eli's Comin'’ and Al Kooper's ‘House In The Country’ are clues. Then there are sonorities. Examples might be cousin sounds to Ellis' fellow-Columbia acts. There is the commerciality of Blood, Sweat & Tears on ‘Love For Real’ on Underground and ‘Excursion II’ on Fillmore, United States of America's trail-igniting use of ring modulator in contemporary music. Two real adventures.