The soul jazz genre doesn’t offer up to many different traits as to greatly differentiate from one player to the next. And especially when an organ is concerned, it’s anyone’s guess as to whose playing apart from those so deeply imbued with background information as to render one a liner note.

With Jimmy Smith, Jimmy McGriff and Brother Jack McDuff functioning as the players who basically decided how the organ was going to function in the genre, it’d be easy to relegate every other performer to second tier status. That’s not necessarily void of merit, but the fact that so many people took part in this mostly late ‘60s and ‘70s based explosion of recording, the perspective’s a bit reductive.

Either way, Charles Earland isn’t one of the guys who help found the genre. He just issued work of the highest caliber using keystones left behind by those who preceded him.

Taking part in recordings by everyone from Lou Donaldson to Willis Jackson and Houston Person should explain a great deal about where Earland was coming from. Those earlier Donaldson dates still reeked with post-bop ideas, even as by the ‘70s, the trumpeter had moved on to more pop oriented fair. But none of the albums Earland worked on as a sideman could have intimated what he was to come up with on his solo albums.

One of the organist’s first albums recorded under his own name, Intensity from 1972, is generally recalled for it being the last recorded evidence of Lee Morgan’s prowess on trumpet. By the early ‘70s Morgan was attempting to move on from his success as a teenager, but was troubled by an increasingly difficult time dealing with labels. Blue Note and Morgan had a history for not seeing eye to eye. Nonetheless, tracks like “Morgan,” obviously written for the musician by Earland and backed by none other than Billy Cobham on drums, pointed to what might have been. The track was all comping keyboards and Morgan flying into solos. Landing between mid ‘60s styled Miles Davis and nascent funk stuff, the track was a success. But a short lived one.

A few years prior, supported by Melvin Sparks on guitar, Idris Muhammad on drums and the aforementioned Person on sax Earland issued his second full length, Black Talk!, just a few months after his first foray into leading ensembles. The album comes a bit closer to aping a straight funk tone, but on tracks such as “The Mighty Burner” Earland gets into territory that sounds pretty bop affiliated despite the tone of his organ.

Whatever aural affinities Earland possessed, the fact that his catalog hasn’t been as deeply mined as his forebears is a bit disconcerting. But in a world where folks searching for creative music look towards shaggy haired rock players distilling work others figured out decades back, it’s not too surprising. Just a disappointment. But while Earland’s earliest albums were all boss efforts, it should be figured that later in the ‘70s the decade caught up with him.