Deluxe reissue of Frank Foster’s The Loud Minority LP for RSD. Released on Bob Shad’s Mainstream Records in 1972, it’s a landmark album and one of the key political works of the 70s. Featuring an all-star cast of superb musicians including Elvin Jones, Stanley Clarke, Airto, Cecil Bridgewater and Marvin ‘Hannibal’ Peterson, it is also Dee Dee Bridgewater’s earliest full recordings. This special edition includes a 20-page booklet featuring amazing unseen session photos recently unearthed, an introduction by Judd and Mia Apatow (Shad’s grandchildren), an essay by British journalist Kevin Le Gendre and an exclusive interview of Cecil and Dee Dee Bridgewater by Paul Bowler. The album’s original artwork as been recreated with original photos and the audio newly remastered from the original tapes.
The Albums opening track—The Loud Minority, begins with some politically charged spoken word from no other than Dee Dee Bridgewater, stating in rather plain terms that she, and by extension the African Americans, “are part of a loud minority, and as such we are a part of those concerned with change (…) This change must come in the form of victory over all the evils”, opening up a polemic of social consciousness with a certain ecnumenical characteristic, harking back to her Baptist Church days, delivering her verses with the same pertinence and rousing vocal characteristics, the latter section of the song opening up into call and response type refrains. The song opens up after a few minutes, a hard hitting piece of spiritual Jazz-Funk with a raucous horn section accompanied by a frenzied solo guitar doing a number on the pentatonic scale. Potent and funky drumming from Elvin Jones drives the song forward alongside intricate volleys of acoustic piano from Harold Mabern. The music is certainly as ideologically provoking in this instance as it is musically challenging, a cosmic stew of electric Funk-Fusion and Jazz-Rock, a structural liberation of the musical avant-garde with meaningful poetic lisence to back up its aural assault. Requiem for Dusty is harder hitting, playing off a traditional blues scale, a harkening back to the roots of the music, although re-contextualised by a tightly arranged Jazz unit, comprising the likes of Airto Moreira on percussion, Charles McGhee and Cecil Bridgewater on first and second trumpet, Stanley Clarke on Bass.
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