FRESH OUT by EDDIE RUSS

Soul Jazz Records/Universal Sound are reissuing this classic dance jazz album digitally remastered and cased in an original artwork exact reproduction on hardboard Jap-style box case for the CD!Eddie Russ’s debut album Fresh Out was recorded in Detroit in 1974. The album featured the group The Mixed Bag, which Russ put together in 1972 from members of the local Detroit jazz community, where he had made his base. Fresh Out, originally released on the independent Jazz Masters label, also later became the debut release for Soul Jazz Records when we first released the album in 1992 (20 years ago!). In his long and distinguished career, the legendary Pittsburgh-born keyboardist Russ played with a stunning array of legendary jazz musicians that included Dee Dee Bridgewater, Dizzy Gillespie, Stan Getz, Roland Kirk, Sonny Stitt, Sarah Vaughan, Hank Mobley, Cal Tjader, among many others. Eddie Russ and The Mixed Bag released two more seminal classic jazz-funk albums in the mid-70s (‘See The Light’ and ‘Take A Look at Yourself’). The Mixed Bag also released it’s own album (with Russ appearing under the alias Gaff Dunson!) on Wendell Harrison, Phil Ranelin and Marcus Belgrave’s collective Tribe label . Members of this group also recorded for Kenny Cox and Charles Moore’s similarly styled Strata label – these labels being the two main independent jazz record labels in Detroit during the 1970s. In 1992, on the strength of the release of Fresh Out, and the issue of the single ‘The Lope Song’ (which features on this album), both on Soul Jazz Records, Eddie Russ performed in Europe. This is a 20th anniversary issue of Soul Jazz Records first album. Eddie Russ died in 1996.