High Spirits (album)

High Spirits is an album by Jamaican saxophonist Joe Harriott featuring selections from the musical High Spirits written by Hugh Martin and Timothy Gray which was recorded in England in 1964 and released on the Columbia (UK) label in February 1965.

[2] Harriott recorded eight numbers arranged by Pat Smythe from the popular stage musical "as if rejecting the experimentation of his previous LPs", says Richard Morton Jack.

Criticism that the material is not worthy of the musicians is beside the point, says Jack: "They wanted to prove their versatility".

It is doubtful that Harriott could ever have made a bad record and, by most other people's standards, this would be top flight.

[4] Morton Jack writes that the "arrangements leave plenty of space for incisive, sensitive solos from Harriott and Keane [giving it] an improvisational edge that rescues it from blandness.