From April 2014. Confession time: I’d never heard Joyous Lake at all until two days ago, missing out on it for a mere 37 years. Some Martino aficionados think that it is Martino’s best record. But it really depends on which end of the telescope you’re looking through. Post the brain aneurysm that afflicted the Philly jazz legend in 1980 just a few years after this album was made and his having to “relearn” everything, you could be forgiven (although that’s still no real excuse) for thinking that the Martino fusion period never really existed (!) as Martino, who’s 70 this summer, made a new career playing highly advanced pristine acoustic post-bop for Blue Note to huge acclaim.

The hard-to-find Joyous Lake (the title derives from the I Ching and a 1970s Woodstock club Martino played in) unavailable on CD on its own in the UK until now as part of the 1000 yen series strikes me with all the zeal of a convert as coming across as clear sighted prog-jazz a step away from orthodox jazz-rock. So if you, like me, appreciate bands knocking around today such as Troyka (with Chris Montague chopping out Holdsworthian lines from the watching commentariat of oozing organ and ritualistic drums) then Joyous Lake might just switch on an electric light. But it is different as after all Martino came out of the soul-jazz organ tradition replacing George Benson by accident as much as design in Brother Jack McDuff’s band. The soulfulness he shares with Benson has never left Martino and you’ll hear it here.

Here in laundry list form is what is striking about Joyous Lake: 1/ hyperactive, persuasive drums from Kenwood Dennard; 2/ more metre than a kilometre in the sub-divisions; 3/ an all-pervasive Oberheim polyphonic spree courtesy of Delmar Brown; 4.⁄ electric bass from Mark Leonard almost anticipating the Pat Metheny Group fusion sound; 5/ loads of intelligent Herbie-isms from Brown on ‘M’wandishi’; 6/ Martino cutting the air like a knife on the devastatingly compulsive ‘Song Bird’; 7/ the fine Steve Klein-engineered sound again a world away from horrible digital fusion production methods we’ve become accustomed to on contemporary fusion labels. Klein was one of the engineers on the classic AWB album a few years earlier; and, 8/ finally: the momentous title track that (let’s face it) must have given Pat Metheny plenty of food for thought as at this stage in Metheny’s career the Missourian had only just begun albeit with Bright Size Life already under his belt. An album to tell your friends about as you never know they might just have missed out on this one even after all these years. SG

Updated from 18 June 2017 Reader, Cliff Shain from Johannesburg, South Africa got in touch and writes: “Spot on… this album is simply sublime and incredible… and like you, though I am a Pat Martino freak fan, I only discovered this album like now. Started collecting vinyl again and was at my fave vinyl store in Johannesburg, South Africa, where I live and found a copy of this, this afternoon. An original Warner Bros 1976 copy in excellent condition. Listening to it right now as I type this mail I did an online search and came up with your post so thought I should respond to you. The band is incredible. Don’t know why it got such a poor reception, [which was] lukewarm, when it was released, but listening to it now in 2017, even with all the Martino output since it sounds as fresh and incredible as I’m sure it did when it came out. You say it [wasn’t previously] available on CD? At least I have this beautiful vinyl copy of Joyous Lake and [which is] a joy to listen to.