Ilhan Mimaroglu featuring Freddie Hubbard, Sing Me a Song of Songmy (side A)

1971's Sing Me a Song of Songmy is a tough album to describe. Highbrow composers before Mimaroglu have experimented with incorporating jazz ideas. Milhaud borrowed from his understanding of jazz with La Creation du Monde, and Gunther Schuller proposed his ideas of a "third stream". Also in 1971, Krzysztof Penderecki and Don Cherry collaborated on Actions. Sing Me a Song of Songmy stands out because of the way Mimaroglu uses the jazz quintet as yet another contextualized sound source. Their playing, when surrounded by a crazy string orchestra and some very strange vocal samples, seems completely detached from the jazz idiom that they're creating. The album is incredibly well recorded, and the violent Picasso image used on the cover matches the rich content of the vocal samples and track titles.