Charles Bobo Shaw, The Human Arts Ensemble, Joseph Bowie

Junk Trap is the album drummer Charles Bobo Shaw recorded in Milan in May 1978 with his Human Arts Ensemble, a quintet with trombonist Joseph Bowie, alto saxophonist Luther Thomas, guitarist James Emery and bassist John Lindberg. Shaw came out of St. Louis, where he helped form the Black Artists Group in 1968, barely out of his teens, and he created the Human Arts Ensemble as a collective open to musicians of other races. The Milan session put two of those St. Louis horn players next to a guitar and bass pairing from New York, and the result was released by Black Saint the same year.

The session was taped at GRS Studios in Milan, produced by Giacomo Pellicciotti with Walter Prati as assistant producer and engineered by Carlo Assalini Michel. Shaw plays drums and also bugle, and Lindberg switches between acoustic and electric bass. A year later Emery and Lindberg were back in Milan with violinist Billy Bang to record First String, the debut of the String Trio of New York, the group the two of them had started in 1977. Shaw wrote most of the seven pieces, two of them, Brown Rock City and the title track, with Ray Cheng, while Bowie contributed the short closer Sequence. Night Dreamer is the longest track at almost eleven minutes, and the record runs to about fifty minutes in all.

This is the Black Saint CD 120021-2 of the album first released on LP in 1978; Discogs lists it as a reissue made not before 1994, with the seven original tracks.