For a good many years, now, I have been a fan of Kid Thomas and his various bands; so when I first heard about this recording, I was eager to hear it as it had never been previously issued.
As we learn from the booklet, the band had performed in a show in Sweden along with the Duke Ellington band, and after that they headed to the Studio Pub Profeten in Uppsala for a jam session. There, according to the booklet notes, “two guys were equipped with audio tape recorders,” and therein, perhaps, lies the first problem. The sound quality is not very good. Perhaps the mike placement was at fault, or even the recorders themselves were not functioning well. There is little separation or balance, so the ensembles come through somewhat fuzzy. The solos fare better, fortunately, and we can hear the distinctive Thomas style of phrasing, of flares and flourishes, of staccato bursts of notes.
The vocals, however, are not as lucky, being almost totally unintelligible, and they are both quite frequent and, in most cases, long. The vocal in the second track, “Tin Roof Blues,” which is eleven-and-a-half minutes long, takes up most of the track; in similar fashion the sixth track, “Go Down Sunshine,” much of it vocal, is twelve minutes long; and the final track, “Blues,” is eight minutes long. Undoubtedly for the audience there was no problem, judging from the rapturous applause after
