First Flight by Crystal Winds

!!!! DIGITAL NOT AVAILABLE. CD ONLY !!!

This legendary album first surfaced in 1982 on the privately pressed Cash Ear label, with limited local distribution. It garnered some attention (as such masterpieces do) from some of the more forward-thinking of the UK’s jazz-funk-soul scene (before there was a ‘modern’ soul scene as such) and became a highly-prized collector’s item for soul fans across the world, always hard to get hold of and never failing to satisfy those that were lucky enough to get hold of it as one of those rare superlative from start-to-finish albums. It then re-surfaced as a bootleg (unknown to many of those buying it) in 2003, when it was reviewed in Echoes and In The Basement magazines, appearing on ‘Escrow Records’, an act of piracy that upset its creators no end.

The key figures behind Crystal Winds were Paul Coleman and M.C. (Morris) Brown, both alumni of the band Rasputin’s Stash which had had two albums out in the mid-‘70s which had done reasonably well for Atlantic subsidiary Cotillion and Chicago indie Gemigo, respectively.