Moody Jr.

Moody Jr. is a mix of mostly instrumentals and a few vocal tracks from Motown’s premier sax man Jr. Walker, with his strained, gruff voice always complemented by the sweetest of stacked-female backing vocals. Tracks like Bristol’s Way are little more than a repeating Gospel-flavoured chorus which functions as a backdrop to a song-length solo from Walker while the centre-piece of the album is the prescient Walk In The Night, a song that predicts the 4/4 rhythmic pulse and sweeping orchestration of disco that would take over black popular music a few years later. It’s a 1971 Motown album so there’s also a psychedelic soul track à la Norman Whitfield in the shape of the brooding, fuzz-guitar-flavoured Groove Thang. A strong collection and likely Walker’s strongest album.