Consumer Guide Album

Larry Coryell: Spaces [Vanguard Apostolic, 1970]
This match-up with Coryell's British counterpart John McLaughlin--featuring a milestone rhythm section of Chick Corea, Miroslav Vitous, and Billy Cobham--spends too much time constructing tone poems for Barney Kessell and nowhere near enough playing new rock and roll. I know Coryell has lightning fingers and a brain to match and in an abstract way I admire him for it, but what's made him more than an improvising technician is a concept that includes the loud and the vulgar. Here even the inevitable raveup sounds willfully thin, as if Charlie Parker had given up saxophone for piccolo because he wanted to be respectable. B