This classy Japanese reissue of Corea's debut as a leader on LP for Herbie Mann's Vortex label, then distributed by Atlantic, (Corea had played and recorded for Mann 1965-6) was recorded in November 1966. It seems to pull together all his accumulated knowledge of hard bop, what it is and what it might become, from his formative studies copying Horace Silver and Bud Powell solos and as a sideman for masters like Sonny Stitt (1963) and Blue Mitchell (1964-6). The title track (a Corea original) had previously been recorded on Mitchell's Blue Note album Boss Horn, while the track ‘Litha’ (another Corea original) has subsequently become a jazz standard. The remastered sound is about as good as it gets from tapes that are now almost 50-years old, and while the liner notes are in Japanese, the CD artwork reproduces the original album cover, front and back, thus the original liner notes by Nat Nentoff are preserved. Both Shaw and Farrell remain underrated soloists to this day, a fate they hardly deserve, and like Corea, were beginning to make headway with their careers in jazz. Both frequently shine throughout this album, while Corea himself was already demonstrating a talent too large to be constrained by genre definitions – in fact, he was well on the way to becoming a one-man musical genre of his own, as this impressive debut reveals.