He was never really all that close to free jazz — in most respects, he was far more attuned to commercial crossover — but never let it be said that Eddie Harris wasn’t one of hard bop’s great experimenters. It’s just that he was deeper into innovating technology than his technique, using hybridized instruments (especially the amplified Varitone electric sax) and electronic wizardry to give his music that futuristic edge. The 1968 session that resulted in the material on Silver Cycles adds an additional twist, the tape-delay Echoplex, that lent an unreal sense of vast space around his playing. The effect is compellingly bizarre on the astro-lounge “Smoke Signals,” which reverberates against its wordless female space-angel choir like cocktail Sun Ra. And it’s haunting in the elegaic solo-turned-self-chorus of the dub-adjacent “Electric Ballad” — a trick pulled off even more spectacularly in the title cut’s cosmic boogie, which barely even needs drums to bounce like a superball (though the slow-burn beat build in its later minutes kills anyways). Even when Harris deigns to orbit a little closer to Earth, whether paying stylistic homage (“Coltrane’s View”) or hitting his own sweet spot of soul jazz inflected with Afro-Latin grooves (“Free at Last”) and the deepest of blues (“I’m Gonna Leave You By Yourself”), his sharp-toned instrument and the effects it provides make even his smoothest compositions feel like jet-age sorcery.