Though universally recognised as a neo-bop guitarist of outstanding fluency and momentum, Pat Martino was also a leading figure in the 1970s fusion movement, and this recent Japanese Warner reissue recounts one of his most successful albums of that period. Taped in 1977, three years before the brain aneurysm that interrupted and almost ended his career, it comes across now as a feisty hybrid of Weather Report and Headhunters. The mood is unrelentingly taut, staccato and frantic, with Dennard's hard-rock double-time drums and Leonard's fast-bossa bass guitar giving each piece a white-knuckle ride. Brown keeps busy using wah-wah synth voices, which are more electric-Hancock than Joe Zawinul's broader palette, while Martino, as he so often does in tricky situations, solves his problems by launching into the fastest lines he can play. The themes themselves are what distinguishes this band. Martino wrote three of the six, including the title track, Brown two and Dennard one, yet all have a boppish logic and precision that no other fusion bands of this time, John McLaughlin's groups apart, could emulate.