The Album
Charles Earland, the Philadelphia Hammond B-3 firebrand known as the Mighty Burner, fused hard bop technique with blues, gospel, funk, and the direct appeal of a club organist. Living Black! captures him before a packed Key Club audience in Newark on September 17, 1970, at the moment when Black Talk! and Black Drops had made him one of Prestige's most exciting new soul-jazz attractions. The band was remarkably fresh: its trumpeter had joined only three days earlier, while Grover Washington Jr. came in as a last-minute tenor replacement, yet the performance sounds completely unified. Earland's Key Club Cookout and the contemporary hit Westbound #9 establish the record's driving, celebratory mood, while extended treatments of Benny Golson's Killer Joe and Miles Davis's Milestones connect the dance-floor groove to modern-jazz tradition. The nearly fifteen-minute Killer Joe is especially important as an early recorded showcase for Washington, shortly before his own emergence as a major solo artist. AllMusic awarded the album five stars, praising Earland's inspired playing, choice of material, rapport with the audience, and the absence of a weak moment. It also reached No. 176 on the Billboard LP chart and endures as one of the defining live documents of early-1970s soul-jazz.
The Label
This copy uses Prestige's purple/violet stereo label: circled trident and PRESTIGE STEREO at 12 o'clock, with full PRESTIGE RECORDS INC., 203 S. WASHINGTON AVE., BERGENFIELD, N.J. rim text. The Bergenfield address dates to 1958, but the purple-pink top-logo design belongs to the closing phase before Fantasy bought Prestige in 1971. For a new 10000-series title issued that year, the matching Bergenfield jacket print and terminal label design place this copy in the initial US issue rather than the later P-10009 series. The typed runouts' stamped VAN GELDER on both sides confirms the original Rudy Van Gelder lacquer lineage; Discogs documents the same basic PRST 10009 A/B original-matrix family. VinylBeat also documents green top-logo labels on early-1970s 10000-series records, so the relative sequence of surviving purple and green copies is not fully settled, but this is the canonical purple/RVG original configuration.
Fidelity
Rudy Van Gelder recorded the Key Club performance and cut the lacquers, with stamped VAN GELDER present in both typed runouts. The purple-label US original is the fidelity benchmark: robust and full-bodied, with convincing club ambience and soundstage, although it remains a live remote recording rather than a polished Van Gelder studio production. Discogs owners specifically praise this pressing's rich, room-filling presentation, but no substantial Steve Hoffman forum shootout was found. No pressing-plant identifier was transcribed, so plant quality cannot be assigned beyond normal early-1970s US Prestige manufacture. The later US P-10009 and overseas reissues have less documented mastering provenance, and no known Tone Poet, Analogue Productions, Music Matters, Mobile Fidelity, or comparable audiophile vinyl reissue challenges this original.
