After keyboardist/composer Bayeté a.k.a. Todd Cochran established his musical presence on the San Francisco scene playing in Bobby Hutcherson’s band, and before becoming a key member of the innovative band Automatic Man, which he co-founded with Santana drummer Michael Shrieve, he recorded a couple of solo albums for the Prestige label that feature some of the most far-out, futuristic music the legendary jazz imprint ever released. The first, Worlds Around the Sun, created quite a critical stir and debuted his composition “Free Angela,” which was later recorded again by Santana and sampled widely by artists like Kendrick Lamar, De La Soul, and Jay Electronica.
But it was this album, 1973’s Seeking Other Beauty, that represented the full flowering of his vision. As Bayeté says in the notes by Pat Thomas that accompany our Real Gone reissue, “While I’ve held space for the blues aesthetic and jazz in everything I’ve done, I was leaving one world and entering another, unmooring the ship and heading into a sea of unknowns, so to speak.” That ship ended up at a dazzling destination reached by few; early ‘70s electric Miles is a clear point on the compass, but so are Parliament-Funkadelic and Lonnie Liston Smith, if he were playing a fuzzed-out clavinet instead of a Fender Rhodes. Bayeté went on to collaborate with everybody from Peter Gabriel to Herbie Hancock to Stanley Clarke, but Seeking Other Beauty delivers the full measure of the man. This is a first-ever reissue, featuring an all-analog pressing in either black vinyl or “plasma” vinyl, accompanied by an added insert. In its attitude, emotion, and performance, this recording captures an urgency that people are feeling again today. If you’re a fan of music that features a mosaic of influences – spiritual jazz with a fluid futuristic slant, akin to some of the Black Jazz label titles we reissued on Real Gone – this record is for you.
