When the John Handy Quintet hit the stage at the 1965 Monterey Jazz Festival around tea-time on Saturday 18 September, directly before his previous employer Charles Mingus closed out the afternoon programme, few were prepared for the tsunami of sound they would unleash, and the shockwaves that would be felt over those pivotal years that followed. Handy ripped Monterey apart with his adventurous quintet’s startlingly hypnotic performance, pushing advanced hard-bop to the New Thing and beyond. The set became his debut album for Columbia and slammed down a marker for the future directions of Charles Lloyd, Miles Davis, John McLaughlin and other enlightened souls. Rooted in the spiritual free flow of Coltrane’s quintet and Eric Dolphy’s At The Five Spot performances, the two side-long pieces commenced with Handy’s mesmerising unaccompanied alto opening statement on ‘If Only We Knew’, which five decades later still sends shivers down the spine, before Hahn and White erupt into fiery flamenco, Middle-Eastern and rock-tinged routes unheard of at the time in a jazz setting. Little wonder that in December 1965 they were the first jazz act ever to play San Francisco’s iconic psychedelic ballroom, the Fillmore Auditorium, opening for the Jefferson Airplane. When reissued as part of the Mosaic Select triple CD boxset John Handy, reissue producer Richard Seidel’s liner notes notes referred to Handy as “one of the unsung heroes of modern jazz”. Are you seriously going to disagree?

Find it: Original US Columbia and UK CBS vinyl LPs still at £10 upwards on Discogs and eBay. Reissued on CD by Koch in 1996 and as part of the 2009 Mosaic Select 3CD box set: John Handy.