By the time this came to be made, Harold Land’s rapid rise to national attention with Clifford Brown and Max Roach at the age of 26 was 17 years in the past. He had gone on to record a number of albums under his own name for Contemporary and Pacific Jazz in 1958-60, including Harold in the Land of Jazz and the much-reissued The Fox.

After co-leading a quintet with Bobby Hutcherson, he signed to Mainstream in 1970 with A New Shade of Blue, and this current vinyl re-issue of Choma is the sequel. Those who loved the post-bop precision of ‘Dark Mood’ or the delicacy of ‘Ode to Angela’ on New Shade are in for a shock with the title track of Choma. The word for ‘burn’ in Swahili, it is an outright conflagration, an ugly, sprawling, chaotic mess, powered by the relentless thudding of its two competing drummers with Land’s flute almost lost in the proceedings.

Fortunately things improve dramatically on Henderson’s composition ‘Our Home’, with a characteristically powerful, well-shaped tenor solo and similarly accomplished choruses from Henderson on Fender-Rhodes and Hutcherson on vibes. ‘Black Caucus’ has the tenor on full throttle over both drummers, but here the mix of rhythmic energy and Land’s language harks back to Coltrane, in a piece dedicated - after a recent meeting of African-American political activists - to ‘the brothers doing it in Washington DC’. It also has a showcase solo for Land Jr.

The shifting form in the opening parts of the closing track, ‘Up and Down’, interrupts the musical development from time to time, but it has some fine tenor and vibes playing, not entirely helped by the drummers trying to outplay each other, rather than playing for the band. So a curate’s egg of an album for sure, but redeemed by ‘Our Home’.