Launched in 1971 – at a point when a number of prominent Black American jazz musicians were establishing their own independent labels – Black Jazz enjoyed only a short run of releases, all of which have remained unreissued until now. For those fearing this may be one of those ‘difficult’, politicised and history-catching efforts that has controversial overtones for today's audience, worry not. Bishop was a player with a rich relationship with the acoustic jazz tradition and accordingly this is an album which artfully marries the tenets of bop with later developments. True to its time, there's a dash of soul and funk and on ‘The Freedom Suite’ (not the Rollins' one), even some free-improv. If the leader cuts a decidedly modest dash on his own album – sort of Barry Harris meets Hank Jones meets Cedar Walton – then its star is probably the underrated Vick, who shifts from flute to tenor to clarinet, his woody-sounding work on the latter making an intriguing proposition for a Blindfold Test. Shaw packs some notable punches too.

As the press blurb that accompanies this reissue unashamedly admits, ‘think Herbie Hancock's Blue Note recordings with a soul jazz sheen’. And therein lays the reservation with this record: you hear it and it sounds so very much like bits of other, perhaps more successful albums, but little of it lodges in the ear, possibly the real reason why it's never hitherto been rescued from obscurity. You can't call it a masterpiece, nor can you dismiss it as merely workmanlike, but it's not really the lost classic some might have you believe.