Bleep

Parisian boutique imprint Heavenly Sweetness dusts off a lost classic of the cosmic jazz movement with this reissue of the sole John Betsch Society LP. Recorded in 1974 by the ever-searching Betsch and friends over the course of a single day (with all tracks completed in one take), Earth Blossom is largely a genre unto itself.

Rejecting the harsher free jazz of the era’s boiling points in New York and Chicago, Betsch had instead decamped for Amherst, Massachusetts, finding a slightly more idyllic brand of Afrocentrism and student movement under the tutelage of masters like Max Roach. The end result is later period psychedelia, but warped and reshaped through the lens of jazz no longer beholden to any guard old or new.