Freedom Flight

When writers take stock of Shuggie Otis’s career, they usually foreground 1974’s (mostly) one-man effort Inspiration Information, his last headliner solo LP of the 20th Century and a stunning auteurist statement that bridged Sly Stone’s ’71 and Prince’s ’79. But its predecessor Freedom Flight deserves every bit as much love, and not just because it features his original version of “Strawberry Letter 23.” (We’d be in a far poorer world If the Brothers Johnson had never covered it, but the o.g. still stands tall on its own as a masterpiece of psychedelic folk-soul.) It’s because he’s able to inhabit a lot of different worlds, from the lyrically fantastical to the emotionally earthbound, that seem both in keeping with his teenaged sense of ambitious discovery yet further beyond his years in talent and insight. Highlights include “Ice Cold Daydream,” a rumination on the mercurial unreality of relationship drama that sounds like an unrealized Billy Preston/Jimi Hendrix collab (his solo before the third verse is short, but it’s searing), a subject elaborated on with the expressive ache of a man (and guitarist) twice his age on the blues-funk fugue “Me and My Woman.” And that still hits even when he doesn’t say much at all; downtempo meditations like the-title-is-the-lyrics “Sweet Thang” and instrumental “Purple” are steeped in a deep blues that displays a winning virtuosity without kowtowing to rockist notions of trapped-in-amber authenticity. These songs reveal the play-anything eclecticism of a second-gen artist who could still find his own voice in an ensemble (including Crusader-to-be Wilton Felder and future Zappa collaborators  George Duke and Aynsley Dunbar), and who knows — if the beautiful, jazz-inflected wanderings of its 13-minute closing title cut was any indication, he could’ve thrived in any fusion band that’d have him.