This great compilation begins with James Brown's ebullient pride, still screaming in victorious defiance at the fade-out of ‘Talkin' Loud And Saying Nothin’. It ends down in the hole of Sly & The Family Stone's ‘Thank You For Talkin’ To Me, Africa’, the sluggish bass struggling to move under the doom-laden heaviness. In between lies (mostly) black America's genre-warping response to revolutionary times. Rock's commercial leap forward in the late 1960s had contributed, pulling down walls around jazz, funk and soul. The Isley Brothers' splicing of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young's Kent State response ‘Ohio’ and Hendrix's ‘Machine Gun’ shows the cross-currents, with its Who-like explosive release, gospel call and response, and Ron Isley's final cry, too late for Kent State's students: “Don't shoot me…”. Then there's Motown maverick Norman Whitfield's production of The Undisputed Truth's brass-laden, optimistically soulful ‘Like A Rolling Stone’. But, inevitably in this context, it's Miles who goes further. ‘Willie Nelson (Take 3)’, from The Complete Jack Johnson Sessions, has a nervy, glowering insistence, even its funk beamed in from an anti-matter planet, echoing round a troubled head. This still undigested music sounds, as on Miles' pre-retirement live albums, able to go on infinitely. The greatest jazz-minded genius here, though, is Eddie Hazel's guitar on Funkadelic's ‘Maggot Brain’. Allegedly tripping and told by George Clinton to play like his mother just died, it's a slowly unwinding sidewinder of a solo, its deep melancholy reaching freaked climaxes. A superior, razor-edged parallel to David Gilmour's Floyd work, it speaks from a turbulent, brilliant era.