Warren Smith, Composer's Workshop Ensemble

condition (record/cover): NM / VG+ (light wear and distributor sticker on back)

Warren Smith is on hundreds of records - with Max Roach, with Gil Evans, with Van Morrison, in the Broadway pits - and ran Studio WIS on West 21st Street, one of the essential loft spaces of seventies New York, where Sam Rivers and half the downtown scene rehearsed and performed. The Composer's Workshop Ensemble was his own vehicle: a percussion-centred group playing his compositions, self-released because nobody was going to put it out otherwise. Cricket Song-Poem comes from that world and has the unhurried, communal quality that the best loft-era records share.

Private pressing on the artist's own Miff Music imprint. Loft-era New York documented from the inside, and very rarely seen.