Brits Back Door, from 1972 to 1976 (4 albums)

Here's a band I'd never heard of until it was mentioned, recently, in passing at the finish of a wonderful comment to the Coley Goodbye Brains post from long ago, which you should check out.  Those brits really have a flair for this kind of discursive personalized annotation as I discover every time I read the obituaries from one of their newspapers, though nowadays one can spend every waking minute carrying out exactly that activity if one so chooses.  Which one never does, of course.  But the point is, one could choose to do so.  It's all about choice.

Anyways as the commenter alluded to, the four official Back Door albums are all quite similar to Coley's, which came out in 1972 and whose tracks for the most part were written by the sax player Barry Cole.  On Back Door the composers were Colin Hodgkinson (bassist) and Ron Aspery (sax and flute, also keyboards), the two were augmented with percussionist Tony Hicks.  Info is here for the first release.  Most of the music is instrumental, every once in a while on one side maybe on average there is a bluesy vocals song, usually these are inferior to the remainder, being pretty basic.  Despite the genre description, this is trio jazz-rock (more the latter than former) in the primitive or proto style with a nice deep rocky bass-driven energy without any of the 'swingin' style of jazz.  Typically, the rhythm section will carve out a nice funky riff with some unusual aspect that the sax will then build on with its own slightly demented off-topic melody.  It reminds me of the Sweet Smoke albums (Just a Poke) which I'm sure you all know already.  And the compositions are solid right from the beginning in the early 70s contemporarenous to Coley's Goodbye Brains, all the way to the 1976 Activate record which had absolutely zero commercial sacrifice-- the kind that for example led Black Sabbath in the mid-70s to synthesizer and pop plus uptempo soul beats, and that very full production sound typical of the times.

An example from the second album of the jazzier, sweeter Sweet Smoke-like sound featuring the wonderful flute talents of Aspery:





An ex. from the last album of the Coley-like instr. riffin' and the total absence of musical compromise: