With collectable vinyl being reissued on a weekly basis it is becoming increasingly difficult to determine a really essential classic these days. Yet trombonist Phil Ranelin’s 1975 album is an entirely worthy candidate for must hear-music in 2019. It is usually held up as a paragon of ‘spiritual’ or ‘deep jazz’, and relevant though those sub-genres are, the music has a significantly broader canvas. First and foremost, Vibes From The Tribe is the meeting of electric and acoustic aesthetics – an encounter of bass guitar, Rhodes, percussion, brass and reeds – that still does not conform to the patented vocabulary of ‘fusion’. The purr, roar and growl is as much in the amplified as in the unamplified sounds, and it is the very personal way Ranelin blends funk and blues resonances with post-Coltrane improvisation and socio-political lyrics that makes the work so striking. To a certain extent this is a complement to the message music of both Gil Scott-Heron and Stevie Wonder, with longer solos and breakdowns. In any case, the result is a consistently thought-provoking and energising celebration of both blackness in America and universal consciousness in the greater sense.