Keith Bailey, drummer and composer with Joy, was in the process of mastering the album from the original vinyl when Jim Dvorak put us in touch – serendipity, the great wheel turning, call it what you will. We were delighted to find that he, and the rest of the band, were completely on board with our plans to reissue Joy. We sent transfers of the original 1/4″ tapes and Keith took it from there.
Keith and the other members of the band provided some remarks about the history of the album, which we had to edit down to fit into the CD packaging for the release. We are pleased to be able to publish them in full here – and to correct an error in crediting Keith for the wrong section of text on the packaging. We applied his name to the introduction (which we wrote and Keith edited) but not to his original words. In the spirit of making this right, we present Keith’s comments about the record in full:
“Since I have been the band member who remastered this recording from the master tapes to digital, I have been asked to say a few words about the history of the band. Perhaps it is fair to say that the genesis of the band, JOY, was formed in the early 1970’s initially from the association between Chris Francis and myself. When I was the drummer with the Graham Bond Initiation, and whilst performing at the Speakeasy Club in London, Alexis Korner brought Chris down to meet with me. Alexis always had an insight for bringing musicians together. We instantly struck up a bond, being of the same age, and subsequently played together in whatever situation we found ourselves. We constantly played together, even as a duo, performing free-style improvised jazz, and played together in all kinds of conventional and free-jazz ensembles.
“Shortly thereafter, we met up with and added Frank Roberts on piano to our sound-space. Through a mutual friend, Tony Gomez, I met up with trumpet player Jim Dvorak. We spent many long nights listening and analysing music together. Jim had received superb training from the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY, USA, and had landed in the UK upon his graduation after receiving his draft card to go to Vietnam to get killed. His mother wisely packed him off to the UK, where we instantly met up and became the best of friends.
“Together we crafted the band that became JOY. The three became four, and eventually, after several great bass players, we added the beautiful melodic bass of Ernest Mothle, from South Africa. I had met Ernest whilst performing with Chris McGregor’s Brotherhood of Breath.
“Being a drummer, I had secured my London apartment as a space for rehearsals (for many bands) and we rehearsed almost every other day for many years, thrashing out our sound and identity.
“Eventually, we began to perform gigs in the London circuit and began to pack venues. We became ‘hot,’ and ‘super hip,’ and began to be interviewed for national music magazines. We were different to other bands, in that we were ‘straight ahead,’ and had emerged from the ‘free-style’ that was prevalent at that time, although we had all enjoyed playing in that style and idea, or rather, idea and style, since the idea must come before the ‘style.’
“In 1976 we were entered for and received the Young Jazz Musician’s Award from the Greater London Arts Association, which gave us two years of guaranteed paid gigs throughout the UK, plus the LP recording (produced by John Jack of Cadillac Records) and the sponsor of the 100 Club in Oxford Street, London, an important venue at that time.
“Hence, this album. Due to the pecuniary time constraints, this recording is mainly of one-take studio performances of each piece all in one day without edits.
“For many years, I never listened to this vinyl recording and forgot all about it. I think I listened to it just once, and never again, because initially it was such a bad press. And then in 2019, since I work a lot in a local San Diego studio (near to where I now live), I decided to convert the vinyl recording to digital and remastered it. I found myself amazed at the performance virtuosity of the band members of JOY. It was a sort of revelation to the effect of: “The older I get, the better I used to sound!” And then, as a sort of déjà vu, Mike Gavin from Cadillac Records contacted us to propose a re-release of this album on both digital and vinyl. And so, I remastered the recordings again in the same studio in San Diego, this time from the original Master tapes kindly provided by Mike.”
Cadillac Records 