In August 1969 Dizzy Gillespie recorded Cornucopia, an album of the popular tunes of the day including ‘Windmills of Your Mind’ and the Beatles’ ‘Get Back’, arranged and conducted by Don Sebesky, and to some extent rescued by the assertive drumming of Pretty Purdie, holding the whole thing together. His next foray into soul jazz territory was this truly awful album, arranged by Ed Bland, and made a few weeks later, which despite an all-star line-up, manages to be tasteless and uninspiring, and lives up to its arranger’s surname, apart from an almost passable opening track ‘Stomped and Wasted’.

There are solo vignettes for James Moody here and there, but unlike so many of Dizzy’s fine recordings with larger ensembles, this has some ragged section playing, notably in the early part of ‘Chicken Giblets’. Even a hint of a chase chorus with Joe Newman can’t save it. The whole album suffers (as British critic Barry McRae noted at the time) from being “overlaid with a barrage of guitarists and percussionists, and a female choir”.

Given that this was the year Miles recorded In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew, pointing to a future direction for jazz fusion, Soul & Salvation suggests Dizzy was trying a move in a similar direction, but at the pop end of the spectrum.

It is little short of a disaster, and it was a relief to us all when he went on the road the following year with his quintet featuring pianist Mike Longo and bassist Red Mitchell, playing his best-known repertoire from ‘Con Alma’ to ‘Night in Tunisia’. This group’s fine 1970 album Live on the Blu-Jazz label is a much better marker of how excellent Gillespie still was at this period.