Found this one about ten years ago at a record show in Olympia, Washington. It’s about an hour's drive from Seattle where I was living at the time. Typically I'd ride with a fellow crate digger, but I remember just wanting to drive and explore alone that day.
It was a classic cool, rainy late winter Pacific Northwest afternoon. I pulled up to the venue and realized it was a relatively small retail space, which caught me off guard. Record shows are usually in larger event spaces. I felt a little defeated having put all those extra miles on my '98 Camry. Then I noticed a copy of Insight by The Mike Mainieri Quartet standing up in the window. Not a particularly great album, but one of my all time favorite covers. I almost buy it again every time I see it.
Inside was on par with every Olympia experience I've had. Very hippie. Hints of patchouli and Nag Champa. My memory is inserting a cat but I don't think any pets were actually present. In the corner sat an older guy behind two large white cardboard bins with JAZZ written on the front in thick red marker. Those words were a tractor beam.
I started flipping through his records. When I got to Two is One it caught me immediately. I'd never seen it before and the cover had exactly the kind of aesthetic that gives you a sense of how good the record inside is going to be. I pulled it out and set it on top of the adjacent bin. The old man tilted his head up and looked at it from under his glasses, then bowed back down and made brief eye contact with me over the top of them.
After working through both bins I came out with two records. We talked about them for a bit and agreed on a price. The rest of the crates in the show were full of exactly the boredom I'd feared when I first walked up to the space.
When I got home I put Two is One on first. As soon as the opening track, "Bitchin'," came on I knew I'd made the right call. It's a master class in post bop jazz funk. Laid back and relaxed but funky enough to make you want to move. Wherever you are, you're immediately transported into a leisure suit and platform shoes.
If soulful, funky, spiritual jazz is your thing this record is a must have. I lucked into an original pressing that day, and I liked it so much I bought it again when it was recently reissued. It's nice to have a collector copy and a playing copy of your rarer favorites.
The other record I dug up that day is another favorite in my collection, but I’ll dig into that one another time.
Released: 1974 on Strata East
Review by: Def Wax