For those older readers who search the new releases section in vain for familiar names, here's one even you may not remember straightaway. Joe Alexander, to whom Joe Lovano and David Liebman dedicated ‘Alexander the Great’ on their first Saxophone Summit CD, was a wonderful player from Birmingham, Alabama. A local legend at clubs which had signs saying ‘$100 for anyone who can cut Joe!’ He was a member of the Tadd Dameron Band that recorded Fontainebleau for Prestige, but Blue Jubilee – for Riverside's offshoot label Jazzland – was his one and only album as a leader. A shame, because he's a terrific tenor player and the music here is not dissimilar to that of the Cannonball Adderley Quintet. Indeed, Joe often gets an alto feel to his tenor tone and, like Cannon, is totally blues-based in his concept. John Hunt, an unsung hero of the Ray Charles Band at the same time as saxists David ‘Fathead’ Newman and Leroy Cooper (a really underrated baritonist) made even fewer jazz recordings, an obscure 1973 experimental Joe Henderson session apart. His style is very much of the period and reminiscent of maybe Wilbur Hardin. Shades even of one of Miles' influences, Freddie Webster. The four soulful boppish originals, including one each by Tom McIntosh and Hank Crawford plus the standard ballad ‘I'll Close My Eyes’, have a great feel to them with the horns being backed by a wailing rhythm section, Adderley-ites Timmons and Jones adding to the overall mood with ‘Tootie’ doing a Philly Joe! A long-forgotten gem.