Donald Byrd released the album "A New Perspective" in 1964. As I write this in September 2025, it's one of about four of the best rated albums he did, according to the crowd-sourced reviews on rateyourmusic.com. However, it's also a controversial album. If you read some of those reviews, people tend to love it or hate it. That's because Byrd had the idea of overdubbing wordless gospel-styled vocals over the band's jazz improvisations. It's those vocals that divide people on the album. It so happens Mike just wanted to hear the instrumentation without those vocals, and he realized the technology now exists to wipe them away. So that's just what he did.
If it so happens you prefer the album with the vocals, no problem, just listen to the official version instead.
There's more information in the PDF he's included in the download file, including profiles of the other jazz musicians who played on this.
By the way, just to be clear, the real album title is just "A New Perspective," but Mike added the "On a New Perspective" part.
This album is 39 minutes long.
UPDATE: On January 27, 2026, the mp3 download file was updated. For some reason, six minutes of the song "The Black Disciple" was cut off. So that got fixed.
01 Elijah (Donald Byrd)
02 Beast of Burden (Donald Byrd)
03 Cristo Redentor (Donald Byrd)
04 The Black Disciple (Donald Byrd)
05 Chant (Donald Byrd)
https://pixeldrain.com/u/GTRUJzSR
alternate:
https://bestfile.io/en/9DMp5Dlara8mJip/file
The cover photo is the same as the original, with a couple of key changes. One, Mike asked me to add the word "no" before "voices," so I did, squeezing the other words a bit to make room. And the original was mostly in black and white (everything but the lettering), but Mike wanted it colorized, so I did that too, using the Kolorize program.
