A classic of what West Coast jazz authority Robert Gordon once dubbed ‘California Hard’, The Fox is a record with quite a history. Indeed, when originally issued by the tiny Hifijazz label in 1960 its combination of blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shelf life and definitive stylistic performances soon turned it into something of an underground cult item.

In addition to this, it contained some of the few recorded examples of a figure as mercurial as the animal celebrated in the album’s title (although its dedicatee was actually Land himself); trumpeter Dupree Bolton, one of hard bop’s great ‘what-if’s?’ who after a life wrecked by all sorts of nefarious vices surfaced again two decades later, confounding all those who believed rumours of his early death.

But that’s not the real story here. Rescued from discographical limbo and reissued in 1969 by Contemporary (and here in a stunning vinyl facsimile), this is a record that effectively bridges the two artistic phases of its leader, the gauzy-toned tenor who’d established himself as one of the Los Angeles scene’s top boppers with his famed stint in the Max Roach/Clifford Brown quintet a few years earlier, but whose ears had latterly been opened wide by John Coltrane’s work.

A few years’ hence Land’s characterful, always personal, style was to be almost completely buried beneath the Traneisms, but here he brokers the ground between his new and old selves with total success. In fact, this is an album of considerable subtlety beneath its apparent veneer of Hollywood hard bop. While the furious title track recalls the Brown/Roach axis, elsewhere things are far from conventional. Quirky New York migrant Elmo Hope’s writing is the key – he penned four of the six tracks – his themes often striking a disquieting note (try ‘Mirror-Mind Rose’), steering the archetypal tenor and trumpet into the darker waters soon to be explored by the likes of Andrew Hill and Jaki Byard.

And while Land gives the performance of his life, it’s hard not to focus on the enigmatic Bolton, whose control of his instrument on the title track is nothing short of breathtaking, supporting the folklore of his being the true heir to Clifford Brown.

Beautifully recorded in that sunny sound that somehow all those LA studios managed to specialise in back in the 1950s, every note rings out with a clarity that makes this a very up close and personal record. So a stunner then, in every sense. If your tastes are for Silver, the Messengers and Miles and you think anything recorded west of Chicago back in the day was a bloodless exercise, hear this and think again.

“The session has always loomed large in my mind as an important event” Land is quoted as saying on the sleeve. It’s much more than that though; it’s a record which has stood every test and which sounds, 65 years later, as fresh as paint.