Jazz Sabbath: The 1968 Tapes

The story continues: Jazz Sabbath's eponymous debut (Blacklake, 2020) introduced the premise of a progressive-minded late-'60s piano trio whose unreleased material was plagiarized and adapted in heavy blues style by those young upstarts Black Sabbath. The catalog got an even more fun horn-drenched expansion with 2022's Vol. 2 (Blacklake). The mysterious pianist Milton Keanes (da-dum) and friends commit to the mythology more than ever with The 1968 Tapes, complete with cover in classic Blue Note Records style and a mini-documentary behind the scenes. Whoever is handling the group's PR is really not getting paid enough.

The story goes that this was a predecessor to those other recordings, the black-sheep session deemed too experimental to release even before the band's tapes were lost. There are plenty of ambitious touches to back that up: although these arrangements have jitterbuggy energy to spare, the classic trot is spiced up by the odd dash of wild guitar or out-there synth to give a tinge of the cosmic. The club-jazz skittering of "Into the Void" quickly becomes a psychedelic funk jam with punny-named guests on sax and guitar; "Spiral Architect" bounces from dreamy ballad to ragtime stomp with barely a blink.

If the remaining tracks seem less extensive, they are no less expansive. They step lively through the "original" form of "Electric Funeral" as a moody-blue noir; "Warning" soars into a haze of Moog swirls. If these arrangements are light-years away from the versions the world has known for all these decades, that is precisely the point. There is always great fun to be had spotting the bones of the more famous pieces in this framework, especially a downright jaunty "War Pigs" bookended by a warm gospel intro and grand outer-space sweep to close. The trio sounds more smoothly gelled than ever stepping through snappy turns and flighty detours alike. As impressive as the back-history gimmick is, it feels more authentic and yet less necessary every time—any jokes aside, this Sabbath can hold its own with any jazz and/or rock combo out there.