[DAMAGED] Booker Ervin - The Book Cooks

*All of these copies have bent jackets, dinged corners or seam splits.

Vinyl reissue of the classic 1961 debut album by the American jazz tenor saxophonist. Booker Ervin was one of jazz's biggest what-if's; he died young, at 39, from kidney disease, right as he was hitting another wave of sonic experiments. He was a tenor who played the blues like they emanated from deep inside him, taking inspiration from field hollers as much as bebop. He got compared to Coltrane - who made a lot of similar playing decisions - but he had a different way of playing his blues. The Book Cooks shows that Ervin arrived on the solo scene essentially fully formed; he'd change towards the end of the '60s, but this LP was a roadmap for him for the first part of his bandleader career.