condition (record/cover): EX / EX- (minimal wear)

Gatefold sleeve.

1968: Gary Bartz's cosmic breakthrough on Milestone, with a heavyweight cast including Pharoah Sanders, Charles Tolliver and Stanley Cowell - the generation that absorbed Coltrane's lesson whole and turned it toward new suns. The side-long title suite reaches for deep space years before spiritual jazz became a genre tag, moving through episodes of modal churn, free eruption and hymn-like calm with genuine compositional ambition, while the alto stays anchored in the Parker-through-McLean lineage Bartz never abandoned - the discipline underneath the cosmos, which is exactly what makes the cosmos convincing. This is the record that announced him as a major voice, shortly before Miles came calling for the Live-Evil band.

Long a digger favorite, increasingly recognized as one of the essential statements of its moment, and getting more loved by the year as the spiritual jazz revival keeps sending new listeners back to the sources. Original US Milestone pressing.