Recorded on this date in 1970
Slugs’ was the kind of after-hours club where the real music happened — a cramped basement dive on East Third Street where musicians went to stretch out after their uptown gigs ended. Charles Tolliver had been making waves in the late sixties with Freddie Hubbard and Jackie McLean, but by nineteen seventy he was ready to lead his own revolutionary unit. Music Inc featured Stanley Cowell on piano, Steve Novosel on bass, Jimmy Hopps on drums, and Nathan Davis on saxophone — five musicians committed to pushing jazz into uncharted territory. The Strata-East label, co-founded by Tolliver and Cowell, would release this double album in seventy-two as their flagship statement. This wasn’t just another live recording — it was documentation of a new movement, captured in the sweaty intimacy of New York’s most uncompromising jazz room. The energy that night was electric, with the quintet feeding off the crowd’s intensity and the room’s legendary acoustics.
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