Ever the inventive drummer since his early forays with AACM in the mid 1960s, and game-chamging roles in the Charles Lloyd Quartet and Miles Davis’ seismic Bitches Brew period, Jack DeJohnette’s forward-looking hunger followed through to his 1968 debut as a leader, the impressionistic The DeJohnette Complex. Three early 1970s solo albums followed: Have You Heard for Epic and Sorcery and Cosmic Chicken for Prestige, cut before his ECM and Keith Jarrett years.

Each pivoted – with varying success – between modal and free, psychedelic jazz, avant-funk and jazz rock, as if looking for a place to land. His use of keyboards, which he studied prior to drums, was as prominent on those albums as his stickwork, particularly on 1974’s hard-to-find Sorcery, which now gets a vinyl reissue on Craft’s Jazz Dispensary imprint, with all-analogue mastering by Kevin Gray.

The aptly-named title track casts an absorbing spell: a mystic modal slow burn underpinned by Holland’s goading ostinato bass figure and DeJohnette’s persistent pulse, building at length from Goodrick’s vaporous electric sky trails to the raging storm of Maupin’s eastern-tinged bass clarinet. The Civil Rights vocal/chant collage of ‘The Right Time’ suggests what a collaboration between The Fugs and the Last Poets might have sounded like, while ‘The Rock Thing’, with Abercrombie, unfortunately doesn’t rock, or roll. Side Two is dominated by DeJohnette’s 14-minute eulogy to Martin Luther King, ‘The Reverend King Suite’. Jazz, said King, had the ability to take “the hardest realities of life and put them into music, only to come out with some new hope or sense of triumph”, and this is reflected here by DeJohnette’s experimental sonic tapestry, woven with duelling layers of drums, organ, synthesizers and sax; while Holland and Fellerman’s trombone help express the anger and hope. Concluding with the swampy synthesizer-led broken beat groove of ‘Epilog’, which recalls early Weather Report at their greasiest, it’s an album of its time for sure, yet in places captivatingly on point with today’s striving for early-1970s authenticity.