Guitarist Sparks was one of the great discoveries of the ‘Acid Jazz’ years, a purveyor of a particularly tough, gritty sound in the early 1970s that acknowledged the innovations of James Brown as much as it did the vocabulary of hard bop. The story of this session is well told in the titles of the first two songs on offer: ‘I’m Funky Now’ is as JB-ish as you like and ‘Disco Booty’ is a nod to the changing face of black popular music. Sadly, Sparks is caught rather uncomfortably between the two, producing occasional eruptions of ‘on the one’ grooving of which the godfather would have approved but too often coasting on a much softer, at times bland, sound that the band doesn’t enhance with any great improvisatory verve. It’s by no means a totally pointless session, but whether it was really worth a reissue today is definitely up for debate.