Cannonball Adderley's tenure at Capitol Records in the 1960s saw him working extensively with the label's great composer-arranger-producer David Axelrod. The pair made for a good team – Adderley produced some of his best-ever work with The Ax, especially on the monumental Cannonball Adderley Quintet & Orchestra, which also featured the likes of Joe Zawinul and Lalo Schifrin, and whose three epic workouts – most notably ‘Tensity’ – provided the beats ‘n’ breaks crowd with plenty of plunderable material in the 1990s and later.

There's also this splendid 1968 album, erroneously (and deliberately perhaps?) credited to the CAQ; in reality, it's a kind of Afro-big band session, featuring the great saxophonist, a whole host of uncredited musicians – horns, reeds, percussionists, vocalists – alongside Cannonball's brother Nat on cornet and trumpet and (probably) Axelrod on piano and keys as well as at the controls. It's everything one expects from a Cannonball Adderley date – big, good-natured, soulful blowing from the man himself, backed with robust but sympathetic trumpet and cornet from little brother Nat. Axelrod's backdrop for the two leads is both expansive and evocative – and downright irresistible, nowhere more so than on Cannonball's own composition, the Afro-Cuban blues ‘Hamba Nami’ (Zulu for ‘walk with me’), which if it doesn't get your foot tapping, then there's no hope for you. Also noteworthy are a powerful Afro-gospel flavoured take on Wes Montgomery's ‘Up And At It’; the boisterous, clattering party piece ‘Gumba Gumba’; and the hi-life of ‘Marabi’, which manages to also include elements from South America and the Caribbean.

All in all, then, something of a lost minor masterpiece and one of the highlights of the Cannonball canon, with the two brothers having an absolute whale of a time in the new and unusual (for the time) context in which they find themselves.