When 22-year old percussionist Wali King formed his ethnic jazz troupe, the Afro Caravan, in Austin, Texas in the mid-1960s he became an instant hit with the city's black music community and also found crossover success in the local hippy scene. Recorded in 1968, this debut album shows exactly why. These hypnotically deep percussion jams, pushed along by plodding, camel train bass lines, provide a throbbing template for chanted vocals and haunting recorder melodies that seem to shimmer in a desert heat haze. There's an effortless and intoxicating exoticism to the whole concept that must have sounded perfectly at home in the darkened hashish dens of central Texas. Five of the seven tracks are originals, but there's also a darkly pulsating version of ‘Afro Blue’, and King's arrangement of the traditional ‘Hail The King’ is rightly considered a classic of deep Afro jazz. Pass the pipe, man.

Vinyl sold for $18 at ebay.com in July 2014