Jack Bruce once revealed that in reality Cream was the Ornette Coleman Trio, but neither he or Ginger Baker ever thought to inform Eric Clapton that he was Ornette. Along with Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated – from whose every changing ranks he press-ganged Baker and Bruce as the full-on rhythm team for his Organization – Graham Bond helped to craft the sound of jazz based Brit R&B. Though Bond had first made his presence heard playing passionate Cannonball Adderley-inspired alto sax in Don Rendell’s Quintet, it’s when he quit and switched to a growling Hammond Organ (plus Leslie speaker) as his main instrument that his own band began to attract some degree of attention on the London club scene. But before the arrival of another Korner alumni, tenor sax man Dick Heckstall-Smith, the Organization’s temporary fourth man was a young John McLaughlin. From the start, the Organization performed a very eclectic mix of originals such as ‘Spanish Blues’, with Graham simultaneously playing sax and organ, plus countless covers that ranged from Ramsey Lewis’s ‘Wade In The Water’, an arsenal of Cannonball hits that include ‘Things Are Getting Better’, a fist full of Ray Charles’ showstoppers like ‘What’d I Say’ to The Fabs’ ‘I Saw Her Standing There’. These weren’t note-for-note copies but highly personalised interpretations played at full blast. Much of the Organization’s non-stop tension was generated by way of the constant love/hate relationship that existed between Baker and Bruce spurring on Bond to torture his Hammond in a much more lethal manner than say Brother Jack McDuff, while his sandpaper vocals may have lacked finesse but his commitment was beyond question. Meanwhile, tenor man Dick Heckstall-Smith greatly added to the foursome’s overall potency. If the London-based music industry was willing to give Bond a hearing and precious studio time, live audiences could be divided: around the London area they were duly impressed while out there in the provinces they could be sparse and indifferent. Drawn predominantly from BBC air shots (some introduced by George Melly), plus odds and sods including a pairing of Bond with Pete Brown make this a worthy companion to Repertoire’s earlier 4CD collection Wade In The Water in that it repositions Graham Bond’s stature as a prime mover in the development of jazz based R&B.