The Mark Leeman Five - Memorial Album (1991)

The second demo single and the album are revelatory; though all the tunes are covers, the musicianship is impressive and the energy is astonishing, the latter blasting through the unpolished but surprisingly clean production. Goldberg’s stomping electric piano take on “Green Onions”, IMHO, blows the original away. His boogie-woogie piano and Roskams’s bluebeat guitar power a fine, edgy rendition of Simone’s “Forbidden Fruit”, while “Work Song” and “Let The Sunshine In” hold up easily against the better-known versions by Mose Allison and Ray Charles. The straightforward R’n’B cuts include the overworked staples “Shame, Shame, Shame”, “Got My Mojo Working” and “You Can’t Judge A Book”, but the Five attack these as if they’d never been heard before, with Goldberg’s piano always to the fore. The Memorial Album has never seen a re-release and is now hard to find.