Being somewhat interchangeable with Max Roach on drums while performing with Charlie Parker and Miles Davis says a lot about a performer considering Roy Porter isn’t a name bandied about frequently. As a part of the West Coast – Los Angeles, to be specific – scene of the forties and fifties, Porter gigged and recorded with the era’s most talented players. Sessions with Dexter Gordon and Charles Mingus serve to point that out even if working with Bird didn’t. Think about that band, though. Porter, Mingus, Gordon, Davis and Parker. That’d be nuts. And for Porter, that was pretty much his life.

For whatever reason, the drummer never headed a group as well received as Roach or Blakey, another contemporary who could be seen as an equal. Porter, though, remained an open minded guy. And by the time all the fusion and funk stuff began infiltrating bop during the sixties and seventies, he not only went along with it, but made it his own.

Porter didn’t record a wealth of material under his own name during those decades, but a few made it through and rank as collector’s items at this late date. Jessica, with its gaudy yellow cover and Porter looking left and a motorcycle, for whatever reason, cruising in from the upper right hand corner. None of that has much to do with the music. A but confusing, but still unrelated.

Leading off with an admirably funky title track, “Jessica” is all groove for producers and dance floor fans. As satisfying a work as the opener actually is, there’re a few spots that the band leader gets into relatively experimental territory. Granted, it was 1971 by the time this disc was issued, but there couldn’t have been widespread use of synthesizer in jazz, funky or otherwise at the time.

Whoever Daryl was, though, got a dedication on “Drums for Daryl” as Porter takes something like eight minutes to improvise while a spate of motorcycle sounds and analog synth wash over his syncopation. It’s basically the space-aged version of Blakey’s Drum Suite. The fact that the tune comes towards the end of an otherwise pretty traditionally funky spate of songs only makes its inclusion more mystifying. The following “Wow” sports some space sounds, but not as densely as the previous track. Whatever the reason for these sonic explorations, the result’s pretty engaging, if not incredible. But that’s what the rest of the album’s for.