Arnie Lawrence and Treasure Island from 1983 by request

Arnie Lawrence is an American jazz saxophonist who made a superb improvised fusion album in 1976 called Unobstructed Universe.  So in addition to honoring the request for this LP I was curious to hear if it might be similar in any way shape or form.  Members of Unobstructed were Arnie Lawrence, Dick Hyman, Luther Rix, Mike Knotts, Ron McClure, Ted Irwin, & some of those artists (incl. Arnie) performed with my old rip Children of All Ages from pnf days who made a fantastic favourite of mine "Just Might Turn out to be Sages" with Bobby Dorough on vocals.  I mentioned at the time it's easy to romanticize children if you're not actually doing the daily childcaring/babysitting duties with real kids after which you will feel you're in a lunatic asylum, guaranteed, and be grateful that as adults we have self-control.  Anyways on this page you can see Arnie is performing with entirely other musicians for this LP.  He composed all the music and created the 'Treasure Island' fusion group or project.  Like old school jazz albums, the liner notes extensively document both his career history which included a stint performing on the Tonight Show Band with Doc Severinson (those old enough will remember him) and the stories behind every composition some of which were inspired by poems.  It should be noted that a lot of this is entirely improvised, just as was the case on the Children of All Ages albums.

So what about the music? Quite a bit of it reminds me of the great Alice Coltrane, thanks to the addition of harp, spoken poetry, and ethnic imports (so far, tariff-free) on her albums like World Galaxy. For example, the meditative and drony All-Ways and Forever:





Along with this album I'll post all the Children of All Ages albums, well worth hearing at least in some passages, and the Unobstructed Universe of crazy-ass fusion.

Note the far more attractive Japanese release album cover art:

It was me, or rather, my samsung phone, years ago, that made those terrible photos of covers you see on discogs btw, before I got the large flatbed scanner which, as you can easily tell, is now finally broken, many LP scans later.