Lightmen - Energy Control Center

Format : LP

Label : Now-Again Records

Catalog # : NA 5157

Genre : Jazz

Energy Control Center, Thomas’s third LP with his Lightmen band is his masterpiece: deep-set, maverick jazz that smolders in the embers of a cultural revolution. This is a highpoint amongst the best of the 1970s, and this version of the album contains second disc with bonus tracks: unreleased alternate takes, including two versions of the Spiritual Jazz classic “All Praises To Allah,” and the two singles Thomas produced for poet and activist Thomas Meloncon.

Drummer, bandleader and activist Bubbha Thomas had toured America with R&B revues, served as a session musician for Peacock and Back Beat Records, and played straight ahead jazz with legends before the political and social upheaval of the late 1960s led him to a path first charted by Coltrane. Fancy Pants is his second LP with his Lightmen band and, like the deep-set, maverick jazz issued by the likes of Tribe and Strata East, is amongst the best of the 1970s jazz underground, a collective voice of resistance to the musical and cultural status quo.