The year 1977 was the 20th anniversary of California's Monterey Jazz Festival, and among the customary musical eminences making their first appearance were the tempestuous Ernesto "Tito" Puente and his Latin Jazz Orchestra.

Puente (pictured), from Puerto Rican roots, was born in Spanish Harlem in 1923.

He studied piano, alto sax and trap drums before focusing on timbales, eventually joining the prominent Afro-Cuban band led by Machito.

After three years in the US navy he was demobbed in 1945, returned to the New York Latin music scene and began to fuse Afro-Cuban rhythms with big band jazz, putting his timbales on stage at the front of the ensemble.

His band became an explosive part of the mambo-emphatic Palladium Ballroom performances, and he eventually turned west to play for the incoming Mexican migrant masses in California who loved his music, particularly his Cuban-inspired "percussive brass" trumpet section.

A previous Newport Jazz Festival Puente performance had boiled so hot that the master Duke Ellington, who was next on the programme with his orchestra, reprimanded the festival producers saying that he didn't appreciate having to follow such a rampaging and swinging act. Some compliment there!

The drum power of the 1977 band - traps, bongo, congas and timbales in full accord - is laid wide open from the first moments of the opener, Para los Rumberos, with the brass fury soon blasting in.

No wonder Ellington had been perturbed!

Puente's Oye Como Va features the flute and baritone of Panamanian Mauricio Smith ("How does a Panamanian have a name like 'Smith'? quips Tito) and Babarabatiri is straight from the Palladium days with more romping baritone from Smith and some dirty trombone from Richard Pullin.

Almost 10 minutes of the Cuban ballad Delerio follows, with Frank Figueroa's soulful vocal and a succession of eloquent solos by Al Shikaly's tender tenor, some pulsating trumpet by Brazilian Paulo de Paula, more of Smith's shimmering flute and Pullin's heaving slides - a beauteous track, this.

Puente's timbales rattle throughout Tito's Odyssey next to some thundering brass and belching Smith baritone, before the band swings on to a cha-cha-cha adaptation of Stevie Wonder's Don't You Worry 'Bout a Thing, with altoist Martin Oberlander rhapsodising and de Paula in prime high-pitch form.

"Let's go to Cuba!" says Puente, introducing Pare Cochero, a rumbustious outing with vocal chorus flute and mountainous percussion in full unity.

When El Rey De Timbal finishes your ears are throbbing with Puente's unremitting storm of drums, and it seems a long, long way ahead to 1984 and Monterey again, this time in the company of the priestess of balladic jazz, the Washingtonian singer and pianist Shirley Horn.

Horn was 60 at this time, and it was her Monterey debut, with bassist Charles Ables and drummer Steve Williams.

She had been a child piano prodigy before she went to Howard University, formed her first trio when she was 20, and with the encouragement of Miles Davis and Quincy Jones cut three albums for Mercury in the early '60s before deciding to stay in her home city and raise a family rather than gigging and touring.

The Monterey performance was part of her comeback, and how she revels in it!

Her strident piano is as sharp as ever, especially on The Look Of Love, and her version of LA Breakdown (And Take Me In), the story of a vagrant "crippled by failure and the ache along my spine" who is making a final return home, is spoken, sung and played with a moving narrative power.

The insouciant optimism of Nice 'n' Easy and I've Got the World On A String come each side of the intense lyrical story of A Song For You, with its declaimed words and sparse notes.

Here's To Life is her affirmation, sung by a singer who put life before performance, yet who still performed with a special power.

Oscar Peterson's Canadian tribute, Blues For Big Scotia, is where she finishes, showing her powerful pianism.

The Monterey crowd were lucky to hear her, and this is an invaluable release - out of the blue some three decades later.

Chris Searle