‘Tony Williams was barely twenty-three when he put the Lifetime trio together in 1969, only five years past his stint as the engine of the Miles Davis Quintet. Emergency!, the group’s sprawling double-album debut, paired Williams with organist Larry Young and a little-known British guitarist named John McLaughlin, and the record still stands as one of the founding documents of jazz-rock fusion — loud, unruly, ahead of where the rest of the music was standing.
‘The original Polydor LP, mixed by Gene Radick and mastered by Lee Hulko, caught that ferocity on tape but never quite in the grooves; low end swallowed the drums, and the whole thing arrived compressed into something closer to sludge than three musicians clearly having the time of their lives…
‘Mastering engineer Michael Brändli did this thingamajig Reference restoration and set against the 1969 pressing the gap is not subtle. Williams’ drums, once smothered under tape hiss and organ bleed, now hit with real transient snap. His cymbal work—skittering, argumentative, never just keeping time—finally gets the room the LP never gave it. Young’s Hammond pulls apart into distinct registers instead of one low howl, and McLaughlin’s guitar sits up front without the digital harshness that dogged later reissues too…
‘The 1969 LP sounded like a fight recorded from the next room, three musicians throwing punches through plaster. Brändli’s remaster tears the wall down. Nothing about the performance has changed; everything about hearing it has’ (All About Jazz).