THE BEST VERSION OF "MORE TODAY THAN YESTERDAY"

From AllMusic:

Charles Earland came into his own at the tail-end of the great 1960s wave of soul-jazz organists, gaining a large following and much airplay with a series of albums for the Prestige label. While heavily indebted to Jimmy Smith and Jimmy McGriff, Earland came armed with his own swinging, technically agile, light-textured sound on the keyboard and one of the best walking-bass pedal techniques in the business. Though not an innovative player in his field, Earland burned with the best of them when he was on.

And

Earland's first album for Prestige, Black Talk!, became a best-selling classic of the soul-jazz genre; a surprisingly effective cover of the Spiral Starecase's pop/rock hit "More Today Than Yesterday" from that LP received saturation airplay on jazz radio in 1969.

More here.

I don't have anything really brilliant to say about this.  But it deserves some attention, for sure.  While the original version of "More Today Than Yesterday" by 60s pop band Spiral Starecase is excellent, as are several other covers of the song, Earland's version takes the composition into sublime territory.  The original is soul-tinged, but more clever and pop-ish than anything else, albeit with an extraordinarily engaging hook.  In Earland's hands, however, in much the same way that Earth, Wind, and Fire did with the Beatles' "Got to Get You into My Life," the soul aspect is brought to the forefront, and, with his organ playing creating a non-stop sort of enveloping and overpowering wave of joy, blissful near-religious ecstasy results, making the cover infinitely superior to the song Spiral Starecase recorded.

It just makes me happy everytime I hear it.  You should hear it, too:



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