Clifford Jordan’s Night of the Mark VII Returns on Vinyl in Time Traveler’s Muse Series
There are some jazz records that never really disappear, but nevertheless become increasingly difficult to encounter in the wild. Clifford Jordan’s Night of the Mark VII is one of them.
Time Traveler Recordings will return the album to vinyl on October 23 as part of its Muse Master Edition Series, presenting Jordan’s 1975 Paris performance in a new AAA edition sourced directly from the original analog tapes.
Recorded on March 26, 1975, the session features Jordan on tenor saxophone alongside a formidable quartet: Cedar Walton on piano, Sam Jones on bass and Billy Higgins on drums. The album subsequently appeared on Muse Records and has spent much of the ensuing half-century circulating through original pressings and occasional reissues rather than remaining a standard, readily available catalog title.
That history makes this particular reissue a little more interesting than the usual trip through the vaults.
The new edition was mastered AAA by Matthew Lutthans at The Mastering Lab in Salina, Kansas, and pressed on 180-gram vinyl at Furnace. It arrives in a hand-numbered Stoughton tip-on jacket with new liner notes by journalist and NEA Jazz Master Willard Jenkins, the original notes by Hank Diamond Smith, a rare period photograph by Raymond Ross, and statements from Barney Fields and producer Zev Feldman.
Feldman has previously been a guest on The Sharp Notes podcast, and we always keep an eye on what he and the various labels and archival projects with which he is associated turn up next.
A Record Collectors Have Been Waiting For
A quick look at the collector conversation surrounding Night of the Mark VII helps explain why a properly documented new edition is notable.
Original Muse copies have developed a reputation for being difficult - and sometimes
expensive - to acquire. In June, one Discogs user rather bluntly described it as “possibly the most overpriced album on Muse,” before adding the plea: “reissue already.”
Well, here we are.
Other comments focus less on scarcity and more on the music itself. One owner singles out the album’s performance of Bill Lee’s “John Coltrane” as being worth the price of admission by itself. Another collector, comparing an original French pressing with the U.S. version, praised the recording quality, particularly given that this is a live session.
Jordan in 1975
The music deserves at least as much attention as the pressing history.
By 1975, Jordan had already accumulated an extensive résumé. He had arrived in New York in 1957, recorded as a leader, joined Max Roach and subsequently worked with figures including Lee Morgan, Cedar Walton, Charles Mingus and Randy Weston. His recordings for Strata-East - including In the World and Glass Bead Games - had helped establish another productive period in his career.
Night of the Mark VII catches Jordan squarely within that resurgence. The program begins with Bill Lee’s “John Coltrane” - a composition Jordan had also recorded on Glass Bead Games - before moving primarily through muscular, confident hard bop. Walton, Jones and Higgins provide exactly the sort of rhythm section one would hope to find behind Jordan.
There is also a wonderfully musician-specific explanation for the album title.
The “Mark VII” was not a car, spacecraft or secret government project. It was Jordan’s new Selmer Mark VII tenor saxophone, waiting for him when he arrived in Paris. Smith’s original liner notes observed that a brand-new horn might reasonably have created a few problems. Instead, Jordan apparently found greater freedom in it.
There are worse reasons to name a record.
And Don’t Overlook the CDs
The vinyl LP is only one part of Time Traveler’s Muse activity this autumn.
Five previously released Muse Master Edition titles are also getting limited-edition CD releases: Roy Brooks’ The Free Slave, Kenny Barron’s From Sunset to Dawn and Carlos Garnett’s Cosmos Nucleus arrive October 9, followed by Woody Shaw’s Love Dance and Joe Chambers’ Double Exposure on November 6.
That part of the announcement may prove more significant than it first appears. For several years, the physical-media revival has been discussed largely as a vinyl story. Increasingly, however, the CD is making its way back into the conversation - not necessarily as a replacement for vinyl, but as another collectible format with its own practical advantages.
For archival jazz in particular, CDs make an enormous amount of sense. They are comparatively inexpensive, easy to store, durable and capable of returning recordings to circulation that might be prohibitively expensive or impractical to reproduce exclusively on vinyl.
We are seeing more evidence that “physical media” and “vinyl” should no longer automatically be treated as synonyms.
And perhaps that is the larger story behind the Muse Master Edition project itself. Some of these albums never disappeared because listeners stopped caring about them. They simply became harder to find.
The collector chatter around Night of the Mark VII makes that fairly clear: people have been looking for copies, debating pressings, comparing sound and occasionally complaining about prices for years.
On October 23, there will simply be another option - and this time, with an impeccable provenance.
