1955 10” Julius Watkins Sextet “Volume Two” on Blue Note

Essential and priceless early artifact of modern jazz? Hmm, let’s see…Duke Jordan, Blakey, Hank Mobley, Oscar Pettiford, and the greatly underrated Perry Lopez (Bennie Goodman) on guitar. Yeah, those are pretty solid bona fides. There really is no Volume One, since the Sextet’s earlier 10” “New Faces, New Sounds” features Frank Foster and Kenny Clarke. Anyhow, there’s really nothing to say other than that this is clean, swinging, pure genius bop that at the time of its release was so far ahead of that time as to comprise an entirely different state of the state of music, and possibly an alternate quantum universe. We take it as an almost a quaint given now, this bop thing and all it spawned, but while it was happening it was a revolution in fours. I will never be stranded on an island, because out of 9 billion people on the planet 6 of them are island-stranded per year, so I like my odds, but if I was and had to choose a specific genre only to listen to between long Socratic conversations with a volleyball, it would be Hard Bop.

Also, is Watkins the King Of The French Horn? Well, he certainly was the one who made it viable, which is just a fancy word for cool. This record is beautiful from the ground up: art, photography, design, production, recording, spinning loud. Oh yeah.