Eternal Echoes Sadguru

After years of playing a dispiriting game of musical chairs with various lead singers during the early '80s, Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi finally stumbled upon a dependable frontman when he admitted relative unknown Tony Martin into the fold, thereby initiating the original heavy metal band's long awaited return to respectability – if not chart-topping success. Martin joined the oft-interrupted sessions for what would become 1987's The Eternal Idol album already in progress, stepping in for an unreliable Ray Gillen when the latter moved on to Jake E. Lee's Badlands, and helping Iommi rescue an astonishingly solid long-player from the jaws of complete and utter chaos.

Sing Me a Song of Songmy (1971). Trumpeter Freddie Hubbard and his quintet (which consisted of tenor-saxophonist Junior Cook, pianist Kenny Barron, bassist Art Booth and drummer Louis Hayes) is joined by a chorus, a string orchestra, several reciters, an organist and a variety of processed sounds emanating from tapes. The thoughts expressed in the music (topical and anti-war messages) are quite sincere but the abstract sounds will only be enjoyed by a limited audience.
Echoes of Blue (1976). An exersize in complete contrast, Ecchos Of Blue starts with a latin number and gets us back on familier ground. The whole record is the sophisicated hard bop that Hubbard was so adept at playing. He seemed to learn from experiments like Songmy and applied it when he went back to straight material.