Requested: The Cosmology of the United States ca. 1977

I remember like it was yesterday when I saw this record in New York City's Greenwich Village.  In those days before universal computer file sharing you could find a beautiful promising vinyl like this and on listening in the store the palpitations and muscle-tightening excitement you felt at discovering a lost and unknown gem was indescribable, particularly if like me you were relatively new at this game, unlike the old-timers (like Tom Hayes or Mauro M.) who had been collecting lost 70s gems since the eighties, or back when it still was then and the past was still the present.  And how many hours did I spend back then in those stores with my nose in a bunch of cardboard boxes, trying hard but failing to act as cool as the young deejays with their long hair and scruffy faces...

Nonetheless I was disappointed when I got home and found this to be relatively unprogressive, but beautiful on its own terms as a group soul-jazz album along the lines of US Matrix (the ones who did Matrix IX and Wizard I mean, not the one that d phillips called a masterpiece by Jack Grassel (lol).  These days with the facility of digital music-trading we get several gems every week and the excitement of finding a lost album is much less, and because we're scraping the bottom of the barrel, the really excellent albums are fewer and far between, though I believe they are still out there, based on what I've heard in the last year or more.  I often wish I could go back to those early days when it was so new and beautiful to find the lost progressive gems and hear them for the first time, wondering at the incredible imagination and creativity required to assemble a coherent rock album out of jazz, pop, classical, all these disparate elements, creating brand-new never before heard chord changes or riffs that are almost dissonant but still sound wonderful to these tired old ears.

The cover is a time capsule in itself, with singer Dawn Thompson in then-fashionable Cleopatra haircut, who wrote lyrics and contributed to the songwriting, holding a magic globe that no doubt brought her special mystical pyramid powers while the guy on her left with the super-long sideburns pairs a polyester earth-toned shirt open to his navel with string-tied linen earth-toned indian-styled baggy pants-- groovy, man, far-out!  As the milky way swirls around them.

Here is some more info.  Notice that Colin Walcott guests on sitar, congas, and percussion. For a limited time only (one week) a lossless will also be available.

The best track is Out From the Kiva (which is by John D'earth).  Thanks to Tristan Stefan for suggesting internet archive which is free but doesn't look as fancy predictably.





....