My civic duty to the musical history of Detroit compels me to share this omnibus collection of the mid-70's jazz imprint Tribe. Helmed by Wendell Harrison and Phil Ranelin with consistent contributions from Marcus Belgrave and Harold McKinney amongst others, Tribe is independent, do it yourself, Detroit underground top shit...aka, ground zero for everything I love.

While similar to Strata-East, Black Jazz and the scene emanating from the AACM in Chicago, Tribe holds a particular Detroit bent to the Afro-futurist, free jazz, community-minded focus that was happening at all these other places around the same time.

There are not enough words to spill here to explain how important the Tribe output still is. The anthology here from Vinyl Me, Please does a great job explaining and contextualizing the collective while sharing the ephemeral photos and scans from original issues of the Tribe magazine.

My nit-pickiness has me slightly rankled that the Mixed Bag and Marcus Belgrave "Gemini II" LPs were not included here....but that feels more than made up by the fact that the "Farewell to the Welfare" LP from Wendell Harrison is released here for the first time ever.

The boxset appears to be out of stock from VMP (I'm not sure what exactly "waitlist me" means on their website) but if you've got the dosh to drop on Discogs or find one out in the wild, I highly recommend getting your mitts on this one. 'Tis quite special.