Turning Point

Lonnie Smith (he hadn’t become a doctor yet) made four albums for Blue Note between 1968 and 1970. Turning Point was the second and the most exploratory, with the most high-powered personnel. The horn section consisted of Lee Morgan on trumpet, Julian Priester on trombone, and Bennie Maupin on tenor saxophone, with Melvin Sparks on guitar and Idris Muhammad on drums. When you’ve got players like that in the studio, you let them stretch out, and there are some fierce solos on this record, and some surprising song choices; they transform the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby” into a fascinatingly weird space-jazz meditation, stretching it out for more than nine minutes with some really nice horn arrangements and breakdowns reminiscent of Lee Morgan’s “Search For The New Land” from five years earlier.