It's intriguing to compare Barefoot Boy to Al Di Meola's debut of five years later, Land Of The Midnight Sun. Produced by Impulse's legendary Bob Thiele, engineered by Eddie Kramer, of Hendrix fame (and recorded in the Ladyland studio that Hendrix made his own), Coryell was surely aware of how he was positioning himself between the great liberators, Coltrane and Hendrix. Where Di Meola's sound is studio-bound, more corporate and inflexible, the three jams laid down by Coryell, although more chaotic, remain loose-limbed, exploratory, free-spirited: this is jazz and rock fusing into something new. With no bass on the opening ‘Gypsy Queen’, but with a fab fat mattress of multiple percussion and Haynes' urging drums, Coryell takes on the rhythmic duties beneath Marcus' cascading sax before he too achieves escape velocity with his overdriven solo. The bluesier ‘The Great Escape’ intimates what Hendrix may have really wanted from Band Of Gypsys. The climactic, swinging ‘Call To The Higher Consciousness’ with Mandel now on piano, and Marcus ecstatic, is the most obviously Coltrane-like. So free your patchouli and crushed velvets, sometimes the only way to the future is to go back.