Originally released in 1973, Roots is an amazing album of jazz-funk swagger. Too hot to handle and mostly then unavailable since its release, Be With Records repressed it in 2021 and rightfully blew the lids off a new generation.

You can find something pretty amazing across any and all of the Nucleus albums, the evolving jazz fusion and rock band founded and led by Scottish trumpeter and visionary composer Ian Carr. There is however something that little bit extra special about Roots that makes it hard to believe that something as all-embracing could remain forgotten in the shadows for the best part of fifty years.

Originally released on Vertigo in 1973, Nucleus existed as a fluid line-up of inventive musicians and the spirit of exploration runs through Roots. Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew had been released a few years earlier in 1969, and the opportunities that its awareness (and critical and commercial acclaim) had brought to the jazz and prog scenes offered skilled musicians like those in Nucleus under Ian Carr to take a multitude of genres and really go somewhere new. Roots is a thick and heavenly unity of jazz, prog and rock.
The seven compositions that form Roots play out a lot like a soundtrack; ebbing and flowing between nonchalant cinematics, rasping musical exploration and the odd freak out. Composted by Ian Carr, Brian Smith and Dave MacRae, with the lineup at the time (there have been something like fifty different players across Nucleus’ discography) made up of the cream of 1970s UK jazz, with Brian Smith on tenor saxophones and flutes, Dave MacRae on piano and electric piano, Jocelyn Pitchen on guitar, Roger Sutton on bass, both Clive Thacker and Aureo De Souza on drums and percussion and Joy Yates delivering the amazing vocals that set the album's final crescendos alight. The production from Fritz Fryer and engineer Roger Wake is also incredible, with hugely full compositions never sounding bloated, no matter how dense the instrumentation gets.

The album opens with the titular Roots, a low-slung groover, with looping breakbeats and ever escalating brass lines. Images is full of latin swing lushness (another killer vocal from Joy Yates) before Caliban squelches into full gear with the biggest walls of horn outside of Blaxploitation. The second side opens with Whapatiti, a track that in many ways incorporates the entire first side like a fast moving chase scene through smoky brass motifs and latin flava. Capricorn starts with some of the album's most dreamy and floating moments, before locking into a fierce groove and setting the tone perfectly for Odokamona, an absolute goliath of riff-soaked heaviness. Then finally, after 30 minutes of sonic maximalism and sonic amalgamations, it has one last blow out with the epic album closer, Southern Roots and Celebration. Spiritual jazz and floating chimes take us to serenity before it all starts to gorgeously dissolve into another absolute ripper of brass lines, driving rhythm and Yates just screaming.
I mean, we haven’t even talked about Keith Davis’ album cover! An amazing air brushed vision of retro futurism, with a green robot possibly destroying a cocktail party or perhaps just assisting the party-poppers with a giant ball of yellow barbwire wool. He gets it.

Roots is a transportive listening experience with the freshest grooves, the rawest tones and 101 other lush timbres in-between. Stick it on, you’ll end up somewhere between 70’s Harlem, sun-scorched Ipanema or a fugged out 60’s jazz club. As we say, it’s a trip!