Joe Henderson, Woody Shaw – Jazz Patterns

"Rough diamond" describes neither the carat number of this long-lost jazz treasure nor its humble origins. "Jazz Patterns" was originally released in 1982 on the budget label Everest and was an all-too-carelessly compiled collection of live recordings by saxophonist Joe Henderson's quintet from 1970. The title was changed to allow trumpeter Woody Shaw to participate in order to capitalize on his later commercial success.

Only a few copies were made, which sold for under 5 dollars each, and that was it. But as Skip Heller's liner notes (which we've added) reveal, this shabby little package (it didn't even include the correct song titles for two of the tracks and wrote the correct one) actually contained, get this, previously unreleased performances by the same booth from September 24-26, 1970 at the Lighthouse Café in Hermosa Beach, which also featured Henderson's highly acclaimed 1970 release If You're Not Part of the Solution, You're Part of the Problem! It turned out that Milestone label boss Orrin Keepnews had sold these 2-track reference mixes (recorded by Bernie Grundman!) to Everest owner Bernie Solomon, who then, as usual, took the money and ran.

By the way, that's George Cables on electric piano, Ron McClure on bass and Lenny White (with a bass drum made from an oil can) on drums. We are reissuing this fantastic post-bop find for the first time ever, complete with the aforementioned liner notes, the correct song titles and a new remastering by Kevin Chubirka that sounds around a hundred times better than the original.