Jazz fans and record diggers alike know that the MRL-300 prefix on a Mainstream Records album generally signifies that the listener is going to be treated to something special from the soul jazz/spiritual jazz/fusion world, but before label boss Bob Shad switched to jazz, the first MRL-300 release was actually the hippie rock debut of Big Brother & The Holding Company.
Record producer and label boss extraordinaire Bob Shad launched his Mainstream label in the mid sixties, beginning with jazz reissues before branching out into soul, R’n’B, pop, easy listening, hippie rock, and his beloved jazz. The Mainstream MRL 300 series ran from 1971 to ’74, releasing over 100 albums, most of them jazz of some description, along with a handful of outstanding soul vocal albums too. Fifty years on and the 300 series catalogue remains an outstanding source of surprisingly unknown and underplayed jazz.
300 Series jazz albums were generally live takes featuring authentic, in-the-moment musical interaction and layers of improvisation from the entire band. The label showcased radical young players as well as more established names, whose various takes on spiritual jazz, hard bop, modal, soul jazz, and the emerging jazz funk/fusion sound were often influenced by the musical innovations of James Brown, Norman Whitfield, Isaac Hayes, Sly Stone et al. Through the label’s short life, the quantity of wah wah guitar, electric pianos, autowahs, phasers, Moog and Arp synth solos on their records grew as jazz funk and fusion developed, but Mainstream 300 Series also continued to put out plenty of non-electric post bop and spiritual jazz too, often on the same albums. The catalogue demonstrates Shad’s equal comfort with exploring the accessible sounds of soul jazz and fusion, exemplified in trumpeter Blue Mitchell’s stream of peerless dancefloor jazz jams for the label, or the highly expressionistic, intense jazz suites of saxophonist Buddy Terry, or indeed Pete Yellin’s funky library music / fusion / soul jazz hybrid.
The label also released a few soul vocal albums that have aged gloriously. Alice Clark, Ellerine Harding, Maxine Weldon and jazz chanteuse Sarah Vaughan all recorded 300 Series albums with that impeccable 300 Series big group, big orchestration, big production aesthetic, which have very much stood the test of time and before re-release were incredibly sought after on the secondhand vinyl market, as were many of the 300 Series jazz albums too.
For forty years from behind the scenes Bob Shad had a huge impact on the music industry, eventually producing around 800 albums, and of his many career achievements, his Mainstream 300 Series remains a particularly rich, memorable, collectable and most importantly, highly listenable musical treasure trove.