Juju ★★★★ Live At 131 Prince Street STRUT. CD/LP

Plunky Branch and co live at Ornette Coleman’s New York gallery, 1973.

Legendary jazz-funk collective Oneness Of Juju began as the avant-garde outfit Juju in San Francisco in 1971, drawing on free jazz, Latin rhythms, and spiritual experimentation. After recording debut LP A Message From

Mozambique, they decamped to New York to immerse themselves in the Greenwich Village jazz community, surviving on 25 cent pizza lunches and twobuck curry dinners. Ornette Coleman heard them at Lincoln Centre and invited them to occupy his SoHo gallery, where this intimate live LP was recorded before small audiences over a few days. The players maintain tight musical integration while allowing room for improvised expression. Mozambique is an Afro-Latin percussive jam that gives way to a plaintive vibraphone interlude and founder Plunky Branch’s unfettered sax; Juju’s Door reaches for the cosmos, and there are individual readings of Pharoah Sanders’ Thembi and Eddie Palmieri’s Azucar Pa’ Ti. David Katz