I purchased this used album due to the front cover's groovy aspect and even more so to its title, "Out of Sight and Sound." The Free Spirits are basically a jazz band. Two guitars, electric bass, drums, vocals, and Saxophone/flute. To me, the album yells out mid-60s Manhattan, and I see The Free Spirits fitting in into the world of The Fugs and The Velvet Underground. Over anything else, I'm intrigued when jazz-heads do rock. The known musicians on this album are the guitarist Larry Coryell and sax player Jim Pepper, who, by the way, is excellent on this record.
"Out of Sight and Sound" was produced by Bob Thiele and engineered by the great Rudy Van Gelder at his tremendous and legendary studio in Englewoods Cliffs in New Jersey. The Free Spirits do twelve songs, I presume, in the hopes of getting a hit of some sort. Live, they stretch out like a jazz band, so the tension between the jazz mentality and pop is at its contrasting postures.
The album is not by any means a masterpiece but a great work of curiosity. For those who love The Lovin' Spoonful, The Velvets, and The Fugs, I think this record needs to be placed in that post-hippie but right before the music world became totally dull. Coryell, the music director of this band, became a significant jazz guitarist in the jazz world. Here he put his talents to the rock n' roll medium and tried to stretch it to something new at the time. I love 1967.
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