Well, their third album called Ragamuffins Fool for me was their best, and had a lovely Fruup-like or Renaissance-like cover as well. By far the best song is one called Bebop, which, actually, is so good in my opinion that in the space of one day it shot up to the top of the charts for my personal playlist, and I could go on forever about it. I love the lyrics which are painfully naive and sweet, presumably the singer has a crush on a beautiful girl he sees on the train:
"you can tell she's an actress, by the way she moves her eyes, sympathizing quietly over other people's lives, souping up the bebop, getting on the train, rock and roll the windows, here we come again--"
Harmonically, the song has the diatonic G major 7 sound played by the soprano piano pattern at the outset, but the descending chord progression fits perfectly with the subject matter of the train ride:
The last album from 1973 has the terrible album cover photo, and in general a reduction in quality makes it somewhat less compelling to me. However, the one song called Bump and Grind, again, is out of the ballpark in terms of the lush arrangement and creative chord progression and just the blatant originality of the melodic composition:
It's hard to understand how they could be so uneven. If you check out the 3 reviews posted on the discogs page here, ignoring the outlier, you can get a rough idea of the quality.
After this, founder Lee Jackson was in the amazing 1974 album Refugee with genius keyboardist Patrick Moraz, I guess a prog touchstone for sure, but surprisingly didn't put out much more (though again I might be wrong). I love the Grand Canyon Suite from that work.
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