Street Priest

After playing in both Ornette Coleman’s and Cecil Taylor’s bands, Texan drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson launched his own group, the Decoding Society, which would be his primary project for decades. Street Priest is the group’s second album, one of two they’d release in 1981, and featured their best lineup: Zane Massey and Lee Rozie on saxophones, Vernon Reid on guitar, Melvin Gibbs and Reverend Bruce Johnson on basses. This is hard, urban funk. Reid’s guitar sounds like shredded sheet metal, Gibbs and Johnson rumble along like twin subway cars racing each other in their subterranean tunnels, and the horns are as shrill as sirens and taxi horns. Jackson’s drumming has a loose, bluesy swing, but when he gets revved up he’s a monster, rampaging around the kit with astonishing precision and velocity.