js Because of his work with Jimi Hendrix, Buddy Miles will always have a place in pop history, but it’s a real shame he is not being remembered as the leader of one of the hottest RnB/rock bands in the early 70s. As early as the mid-90s, the book version of “All Music Guide to Rock” had quit listing Buddy and replaced him with trendy cookie-cutter ‘alternative’ bands with one fourth the talent of this funky ensemble. At the peak of his popularity, critics and fans marveled at how seamlessly Buddy mixed elements of soul, rock, blues and jazz into a signature sound all his own and wondered how he did it. If you check out his past work with Wilson Pickett, you can hear that he is just reviving the old school rockin hard edged RnB of Pickett and Otis Redding and then fusing that with some hippiefied psychedelic blues rock riffs ala Cream, John Lennon, Hendrix and Michael Bloomfield. The end result is some of the most upbeat and kinetic music to come from the early 70s with great shelf life in the modern era because Miles avoided a lot of the heavy handed pretensions that badly dates so much music from that era. There are no duds on this album, every single song smokes from start to finish, but a real treat is the instrumental “Easy Greasy” that allows his excellent horn section to show off their ample jazz chops.