Keyboardist-composer Gerry Weil's second album The Message, recorded in 1971, was a well-kept secret among Venezuelan avant-garde jazz and rock aficionados during the countercultural hippy era. Inspired largely by Miles' breakthrough Bitches Brew as well as the brassy progressive funk-rock of Blood Sweat & Tears and Tower of Power, Weil's band boasts a winning combination of soul and fire power, oozing the funky, blues-based musicianship and liberated, spaced-out qualities of the original psych-rock and electric jazz era.

Weil, still rocking today at 81 years old, is actually a native Austrian who as a teenager made Venezuela his home.

The band he assembled here brims over with monster brass band jazz riffage, happening funk-rock grooves, Trane, Hendrix-inspired improvisation and psych-rock atmospherics. Weil's unique half-spoken gravelly vocal on a few tracks falls somewhere between Don Van Vilet and Jimi Hendrix. What is hip? This certainly still is.