** 2025 Stock ** Genius is less a compilation than a compressed biography of Joe Harriott, one of the most radical and misunderstood figures in British jazz. Released in 2000, the album gathers material from several key sessions to sketch his evolution from incisive modernist to pioneer of free-form improvisation. At its core sit four live recordings from 1961 by his free-form quintet, where Harriott’s alto becomes a knife of sound, carving fiercely melodic shapes out of shifting, chord-less textures. These performances, once scattered and hard to access, are here framed by studio tracks that reveal the rootedness of his innovations in bebop, blues, and standards, making the title more description than hype.
The personnel reads like a miniature roll call of postwar British jazz. Long-time ally Coleridge Goode handles bass duties on much of the set, his dark, woody tone giving Harriott’s most wayward lines a gravitational centre. Drummer Phil Seamen, a mercurial force in his own right, stokes the flames rather than merely keeping time, flicking between crisp ride patterns, eruptive fills, and almost Afro-Caribbean undercurrents that nod to Harriott’s West Indian roots. Pianist Michael Garrick appears on selected tracks, his harmonically probing comping and angular solos acting as both foil and foil-cutter, pushing Harriott toward ever riskier melodic choices. Other collaborators include trumpeters and saxophonists drawn from the London scene, adding layers of call-and-response tension to the ensemble passages.
Tracklist choices underline this tension between structure and freedom. The programme moves from reimagined standards like “Moanin’,” “Round About Midnight,” “Confirmation,” “Love for Sale,” and “The Song Is You” into originals that loosen the grip of predetermined harmony. On the standards, Harriott treats the familiar themes as launchpads, worrying intervals, bending notes into vocal cries, and disassembling chord changes into jagged, speech-like phrases. In the freer pieces, melodic fragments dart in and out of collective improvisations: Goode and Seamen react in real time, building a kind of emergent form that sidesteps American free jazz’s more overt chaos in favour of concise, motivic development. The sequencing lets listeners hear how his so-called “free-form” was less about rejecting structure than about creating new, flexible ones on the fly.
Within the broader Harriott discography, Genius operates as a crucial doorway. For those who know him only through the classic studio albums - such as Abstract or Free Form - these live and complementary recordings reveal a more combustible, risk-taking side, unconstrained by the compromises of the studio. The presence of Garrick and other British modernists also situates Harriott firmly within an ecosystem: not a lone outlier, but the sharpest edge of a scene quietly inventing its own answer to the American avant-garde. For new listeners, the album’s mix of bluesy standards and bracing abstraction offers a manageable route into his world: come for the tunes, stay for the way Harriott insists that every note - even the most beautiful - should feel slightly dangerous.
