This is another of Craft’s reissues of the Contemporary catalog, and once again the facsimile pressing and package are superior quality to the original 1950s release: they [Craft Recordings] really are market leaders in vinyl album reissue packages.

The Cry! is audible proof that art is not created in a vacuum, or in this instance when Ornette Coleman formulated his approach, supposedly when fellow musicians turned their back on him. Here, his childhood friend Prince Lasha, on his recording debut, plays a few of the tunes without chord changes he had been working on that run parallel to Coleman’s work.

Sonny Simmons on alto was also thinking along similar lines when he met up with Lasha in Oakland, California. The time-no-changes concept was hardly new to either musician as this confident debut reveals, comprising Lasha and Simmons originals. If anything, they are both more accomplished in their approach than Coleman’s debut in 1958 with Something Else!!! and 1959’s Tomorrow Is The Question! just three years earlier on the same label. That the feeling of racial animosity had not crept into the freedom principal at this time is marked by the final composition ‘AY’ – a rather endearing sign-off meaning affectionately yours.