Audiopile Review: ECM fans absolutely flipped when the label announced that its Luminescence reissue series would feature Bennie Maupin’s 1974 solo debut ‘The Jewel in the Lotus’. Since then, the wait has been agonizing, but it’s finally here. We cannot overstate what a grail this album is. It is absolutely thee quintessential ambient jazz album and, in its own right, a masterwork of spiritually questing improvised music. By ’74, Maupin had already established himself as a heavyweight player of any reed instrument you could throw at him and was one of Herbie Hancock’s most dependable side-players. When it came time to make a solo LP for Manfred Eicher’s label, Maupin tapped various folks from Hancock’s orbit, including the legendary keyboardist himself. But ‘Jewel…’ is a million miles from the future funk of ‘Headhunters’. Here, Maupin and co lock into something eternal and oceanic. It recalls the molten enormity of Mile Davis’s ‘Bitches Brew’ (which Maupin played on) and the jingling heavenliness of Alice Coltrane’s ‘Journey in Satchidananda’. Whether you’re talking about the ECM label or the nebulous concept of ambient jazz, ‘The Jewel in the Lotus’ is very specifically what all the fuss is about. Beyond essential.

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Bennie Maupin has been an inventive contributor to iconic records including Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew, Herbie Hancock’s Mwandishi and Headhunters and Marion Brown’s Afternoon Of A Georgia Faun. His recordings under his own name have been infrequent but his leader debut, is indeed a jewel. “A more selfless album is hard to imagine”, said Down Beat in 1975. “On The Jewel In The Lotus, the sound is supreme, and all the players strive to achieve a thorough blending”. Recorded in New York in 1974, the disc’s personnel is drawn from the circle around Herbie Hancock in the period, but the music has a character all its own.