When this album was released in 1988 the naysayers were sharpening their knives for a slice of the free jazz corpse. The critics would have had you believe the jig was definitely up, countless flames of the fire music fraternity were being extinguished, battering their horns against the same dead end. This album helped change all that that by bulldozing those boundaries, sending Wynton Marsalis' acolytes scurrying off for an, ahem, radical neo-con rethink, while attracting new audiences from the extreme metal community. Far more structured than any of the super-group's live detonations, Iron Path (their sole studio set) bleeds a surfeit of styles way into the red – more jazz, more funk, more surf, more thrash and grind. Even when Laswell comps out a double-Jerry (Primus' race car driver and the skit music from US comedy Seinfeld) it still somehow manages to sound like the sky is caving in. Without the trailblazing of Iron Path there might not have been any Naked City, Painkiller, God (the band, not the deity!) or Zu. Jazz would undoubtedly have been a quieter, but decidedly more impoverished place for its absence.