Back in the Sixties, three years before Miles went electric, Count's Rock Band were staking out new musical territory by combining jazz and rock. They were ahead of the game, their ferocious grooves launching Steve Marcus's Coltrane-influenced tenor sax and Larry Coryell's acid guitar into spaces never before inhabited by jazz musicians. Sure, one or two jazz groups had tentatively grasped the tail of the electric zeitgeist, but they had only come up with a kind of jazz-pop. It was Count's Rock Band, inspired by the new energy sweeping through popular culture, that created a fresh vocabulary for jazz by harnessing the power of the electric guitar and rock's uncompromising rhythms and combining it with the flair and flamboyance of jazz improvisation. They made three albums in their short lifetime, played a few gigs and were gone by the time Miles had recorded "Bitches Brew."

Fast forward to the year 2000. Marcus and Coryell have long since gone their separate ways to distinguished careers in jazz after the heady days of the late Sixties and early Seventies when their musical vision briefly intersected. They hadn't played together, or even been in touch, for over thirty years. Enter drummer Steve Smith, whose mighty chops allow him to fit into every kind of playing situation. After playing several gigs with Larry Coryell and appearing on the album "Cause and Effect," with Coryell and Tom Coster, he's invited to go out on the road with Steve Marcus's project, Buddy's Buddies, a tribute to the legendary drummer Buddy Rich with whom Marcus was a featured soloist in the Seventies and Eighties.

"I had been reading a book called 'Jazz-Rock: A History'," says Smith. "I found it incredibly interesting to learn the Steve and Larry were in this group called Count's Rock Band, right at the beginning of the jazz-rock thing. So we're out on the road and I start talking about the idea of a reunion to Steve -- 'Wouldn't it be interesting putting you and Larry together again in the studio?' We talked about it but at the time nothing happened."

Marcus then takes up the story: "After the tour I'm sitting around in the house, and I thought to myself, 'I gotta give Larry a call, I've got to pursue this Count's Rock Band idea.' I phone him and things more or less fell into line after that. I called Larry Wednesday, and by Sunday we had the record deal!" With an important piece of history about to be made, Reunion is quickly decided on as the only album title suitable for the occasion. Count's Rock Band is about to ride again, and the studio is booked for early December 2000. Then calls go out to Australia, where Mike Nock, the original pianist and key member of the original Count's Rock Band, now lives. He's keen to participate in the project, but he's on the other side of the world and logistics make it impossible for him to be present. "Mike is a magnificent musician and his contribution to those original records was absolutely spectacular," says Marcus. "It was a shame he couldn't make it." In his place Jeff Chimenti is drafted, "Jeff is involved with the San Francisco jazz scene," says Smith. "He also plays in Les Claypool's jam band, The Fearless Flying Frog Brigade, and Rat Dog, the jam band run by Grateful Dead guitarist Bob Weir. I'm always incredibly impressed with Jeff's playing."

With bassist Kai Eckhardt completing the line-up, whose playing credits include Smith's own celebrated Vital Information, John McLaughlin and Trilok Gurtu, the scene is set. Yet when the band assemble in the studio, it is not all plain sailing. 'Well, I have to say at first it had a rather rough start," smiles Smith. "To begin with there was two different primary concepts, one from Larry and one from Steve. And then I had a third concept which was somewhere in between! Larry wanted to do all new music, and he wanted to do very composed music, he basically didn't want to try to revisit the spirit of the original Count's Rock Band. He wanted to move forward and play new music, that's where he's at, he wanted to play what he's into right now. The way he put it, he wanted to write some sophisticated, high level music that required a lot of musicianship to perform, which was great, and I felt this would be great, but I also felt we also needed to play some wide open free jazz-rock material as well. Steve on the other hand, that's all he wanted to do, play some open jazz-rock type material so he could 'just close my eyes and blow,' as he put it.

"The first day we started with 'Foreplay' because it was a tune Steve and Larry had played before, and Larry said he was OK with some of the older tunes, but we updated the arrangements. Then we brought in Jeff and the next thing we did, 'Rhapsody and Blues,' was pretty complex, the writing needed some rehearsing, even though the solo section was straight ahead blues, the head of the arrangement required some work! Next we did the 'Blues For Yoshihiro Hattori' and that went well, but we were still at somewhat of a stalemate in which direction to go. Then in a break Kai sat down and actually spent a couple of hours writing and he came up with the tune 'Reunion,' right there in the studio. At my request I said, 'Kai, what if we have a big open jam in the middle and do this jam band thing that's going on, it would be what Steve really wants to do with this project, just open it up and interact with one another.'

"So we did that and it ran well, that's a first take, it felt magical! The interaction and the conversation between each member, it just felt fantastic, and that opened the whole session up. After that Larry was able to see, yes, that this idea could work, so that was great. At that point we found the middle ground, a combination of the highly composed pieces for acoustic guitar and soprano, the written charts and the blowing tunes.

"Once we broke through with 'Reunion,' everything started to flow pretty well. One of the next things we did was a reworking of 'Scotland.' What I found was that Larry has some really great compositions from the Sixties and the very early Seventies, but I have to say a lot of them are kind of rough and ragged in their original form and so bear re-recording. 'Scotland' is a great example of that, the original of it has great energy and some good ideas but it's pretty rough around the edges. This new version is real together but it's still loose and has some nice spontaneous interaction. We had to rehearse the beginning and end of it, to get a nice flow because there really is no time stated in the intro, its a matter of flowing together with Larry conducting -- he's playing the guitar and conducting at the same time -- so that was a fun track, plus it was pretty hard to play because its in 17, with one measure counted one way and the next measure another way! Then we did a couple of tunes we didn't have to think so hard about and were able to stretch out, like we did on 'Jammin' With The Count' and 'Tomorrow Never Knows' where we really opened up!"

The Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows" touches base with the original Count's Rock Band, the title track of their first LP, and for Marcus, who was the de facto leader of Count's Rock Band, it brought the memories flooding back. "The Beatles made kids of us all in terms of their music back then," he recalls with a laugh. "I had spent much of my previous years completely enveloped in Coltrane and Bartok and really heavy, profound music and then when the Beatles came along I just felt like a kid again. I was a neighbor of Gary Burton's at the time, for some years we lived in the same block in Manhattan, and he and I went to the Colony Record Shop at 3 o'clock in the morning when 'Revolver' came out, like two 15 year-old kids, and we went back and listened all night long, over and over and over again -- same with 'Sgt. Pepper.' In fact, when 'Sgt. Pepper' came out, my wife to be played the entire album twice over the telephone for me when I was on the road! Up until then we were elitists -- above it all, so to speak -- and those guys came along and -- words fail me! Then just sitting around and listening to that, I thought to myself 'Gee Whiz you've got these vamp tunes - 'Tomorrow Never Knows' or '8 Miles High' by the Byrds - this is so Coltrane-y, in terms of the material!' Add that animal growl of the guitar, and you've got the beats -- rhythms -- that have never been used in improvised music before and I thought it worked out pretty damn well."

The original Count's Rock Band made three albums that were released on Herbie Mann's Vortex label. Long been sought after in the collectors market, the original vinyl now commands incredible sums, and for good reason. On "Tomorrow Never Knows," for example, there is a moment of sublime intensity, where Marcus's tenor saxophone invokes the spirits of the recently departed John Coltrane and pianist Mike Nock's chord voicings suggest McCoy Tyner while Larry Coryell and drummer Bobby Moses lay down a confrontational rock groove that evokes images of Jimi Hendrix. It makes you think the unthinkable. This music, so powerful, so arresting, so "authentic" makes you wonder if Coltrane had been spared a few more years, would this have been the path down which he might too have walked?

"There's no reason why not," says Marcus. "Sure, we are after-the-fact trying to guess where such a great artist's head might have been at. But if you examine what Charlie Parker played, what Sonny Rollins played, what Miles played. They were playing popular songs, songs by Rodgers and Hammerstein and all of those guys, it was the pop music of its day -- obviously other than original compositions. They were basically drawing on material that was around them. Rock 'n' roll was the pop music of its day, which you take and you add yourself to that, your own musical personality. This is something I point out to my diehard bebop friends! You see these guys like Coltrane as pure artists -- I'm not going to stoop to this and I'm not going to stoop to that -- but I'm not so sure that's the truth. And I don't see that back then reacting to rock music was 'Going for a hit,' quote/unquote. You're basically drawing on music that was floating in the air. Absolutely. I see no reason why Coltrane might not have gone down that path. If Miles could do it, why not Trane?"

Count's Rock Band made history then and Count's Jam Band is set to do so now by blasting the spirit and energy of jazz-rock into the future positive. Here is tomorrow's music today and it's almost too hot to handle. It's music to scare the pants off you, but life affirming for all that. "I've been saying to my wife for years and years, 'One of these days I've got to get another group with a guitar player'," says Marcus. "I kept using the term a guitar player, a guitar player, well, it's not that simple, it's was really Larry. It was Larry all along. Just to say, 'Larry, you got it,' produces such exciting results! I'm just a huge fan of his, I just can't stop talking about him. And the music we did, some of it was really tough, some of the hardest stuff I've ever played. I loved it - I loved the duets, I loved the open ended stuff - let's hope we do more!" Amen to that.

Stuart Nicholson, author of "Jazz-Rock: A History" (Schirmer Books)