Flow – Here We Are Again
Flow – Daddy
Flow – Mr. Invisible
Flow – Summer’s Gone
Now this is an interesting one, picked up at really the only chance I’ve gotten to physically shop for records in 2020, at the Geoffrey Weiss Rappcats pop-up back in January. Weiss is well known in collector circles for having eclectic tastes, and I especially love checking out these kind of collections because you always find some surprises (I’ll be featuring a few more records picked up the same day in coming months). The cover art on this one was intriguing, but what really grabbed my attention was the fact this record was on CTI, but I’d never seen it before. That’s not to say that I really collect much off of the CTI label, but I’ve run into enough records over these past 25+ years of diggin’ to know when I haven’t seen a record before. I became even more intrigued when I checked out the back cover and saw not only this wild picture, sketched by the drummer Mike Barnett, but also that one of the band members was listed as a “lead vocal,” and I couldn’t remember a single CTI album that was a vocal record.
Dropping the needle on the first song “Daddy,” revealed that this definitely didn’t sound like anything I’d ever heard on CTI. While there was a bit of funk to the drums, the sound was more country-psych than the jazz or jazz-funk I was used to from CTI records. “Here We Are Again” definitely had more of a jazzy feel to it, but still is something I’d classify as soft-psych than really being close to Jazz. Flow flowed from one style or genre to another, but none it seemed suited for the CTI sound I’d thought I knew so well.
Turns out, in 1970, when Creed Taylor separated CTI from A&M records and truly became indepedent, there were a short run of records, “The 1000 series,” which including this one, as well as albums from Kathy McCord and Dave Frishberg that also don’t fully fit into the sound we associate with CTI as a label. I’ve only heard parts of those albums, but they share some similarities with this album from Flow, all with vocals, and a style that while it could be called jazzy at times, is clearly not Jazz.
Having solved that minor mystery, helped place the album into a proper context, though I still wonder how a band like this came to Creed Taylor’s attention and what the story was behind them signing with CTI and releasing this album. Mostly though, I’m just thankful I discovered it and learned something new after all these years in the record game.