WATERCOURSE WAY

If you had this album in your collection in the late '70's it would have been one of your more prized prog albums. While Shadowfax wasn't as well known as some the big names from the 1970's, partly because they only did one album then, their first one was absolutely stunning.

Better known for their usually mellower output for the Windham Hill label, this is a tasty mixture of heavy and mellow music. If you can judge an album by its musician's instruments, how about this: bass, cowbell, drums, tabla, percussion, guitar, sitar, vocals, lyricon, saxophone [soprano], flute, recorder, oboe, clarinet, piano, electric piano, synthesizer [moog, sequencer], harpsichord, keyboards [chamberlin]? OK some of those are fairly conventional, but what they did with those musically is something else. Still plenty of good things happening in 1976, but this album was in the same league as any of the great albums by the great names in progressive rock at the time. If you have to relate their music to similar artists, Mahavishnu Orchestra, Gentle Giant, and Oregon come to mind in particular.

A testament to the power of this album, though they went for six years before releasing their next album, they still had a legion of loyal fans that would show up at concerts with well worn copies of this album wanting replacements. In 1985 the Windham Hill label granted us our wish and released it a new version remixed and with "additional recording", minus the excellent original cover art. Alas, this release is also out of print. As an interesting footnote, Larry Fast AKA Synergy, co-produced the original album. He was putting out albums on the same Passport Records label.