Fellow Blogcritic Stephen V. Funk last week wrote an informative, fascinating, and musically intriguing post about Impulse! Records, the great jazz label that represented the vanguard of the music in the sixties and early seventies. The label was celebrating its 45th anniversary, Funk pointed out; wouldn't this be a great time to avoid the standard cliches of best-ofs and messy compilations, instead releasing on CD some of the hundreds of Impulse! recordings that have never been digitally remastered? To make his point, he listed several examples of the best and most interesting still-not-on-CD albums.

It's a great list, and one that needed to be made. And yet, as I found myself poring over it and...um...going about my favorite not-quite-legitimate methods of acquiring music on the Internet, it occurred to me that some people might need a refresher (or an introduction outright) to the excellent material that IS available from Impulse! on CD. Thus I present my companion article to Funk's: Ten Impulse Records Releases Any Jazz Fan Should Own.

The criteria I set for myself were very few. The material had to be originally released on Impulse, of course; it has to currently be in print on CD today; it has to be in my library; and, most challenging, every musician can appear only once on the list as a leader. There is one reason and one reason only for this last: because if I just made a list of the ten best albums on Impulse!, period, at least half would all be John Coltrane records. Which is fine, but it doesn't give you the sense of great richness, variety, and originality that you could find in the Impulse! spectrum.

I did NOT make it a criterion that the records not come out later than 1972. But as I look at the list, none of them do, even though Impulse! has released records since then and continues to do so today. It just so happens that most of the classic and most important Impulse! releases came in those first eleven years of the label's life. It can't help it, and neither can I.

So without further ado, the list.

10) Liberation Music Orchestra, Charlie Haden (1969) - Haden is a virtuoso bassist, but he consistently proves that imagination is more important than skill in jazz. Especially on Liberation Music Orchestra, a big-band, spirit-of-the-sixties protest album that channels world music and the vibe of the rock festivals. The album covers those lefty causes of Vietnam, the civil rights movement, and even Che Guevara. It's contemporary and tangential to the work of Gil Scott-Heron and perhaps Eddie Gale, but Haden's album sounds nothing like either of those two...or, for that matter, anything else.

 9) Space is the Place, Sun Ra (1972) - Perhaps I'm biased because it was my introduction to Sun Ra, but I find Space is the Place to be a logical starting point for almost anyone. If for no other reason, the sheer variety should do the trick: the theatrical, soulful title track, the flat-out swing of "Images," the afro-jazz of "Discipline," the — well, just what it says it is — of "Sea of Sounds," and the weird but funny revisiting of Ra's classic "Rocket Number Nine Takes Off for the Planet Venus." Plus, Sun Ra's headgear on the cover is really cool.