" data-original-title="" title="">Graham Bond was the most important and influential musical pioneer to emerge from British jazz in the 1960s. High praise indeed, but in his case it is warranted. His legacy might be defined less by the music he recorded and more by the impact he had on subsequent generations of musicians. However, that impact is such that one can with every justification suggest that he and his ORGANization invented jazz-rock. The success Bond craved and believed was rightfully his never came—as much as anything, he was a victim of his own desires and fantasies. These led inexorably to problems with drugs and bad career moves, which in turn stemmed from what was very clearly a deeply-flawed and perhaps damaged personality.

Harry Shapiro, in his biography of Bond The Mighty Shadow (Crossroads Press, 2004), pulls no punches. He hints that Bond's psychological difficulties may be traced back to the fact that he was an adopted child unable to resolve the questions of his abandonment and origins. The portrait that emerges is a complex one. Bond was a charmer and one still remembered with a combination of affection and frustration by those who knew and worked with him. Yet, he ripped people off, wasted his talent and, most serious of all, sexually abused teenage girls, including the daughter of his last wife Diane Stewart. In a business littered with the casualties of indulgence, there is a tendency to romanticize musicians and artists who skirt the limits of self-destruction and sometimes fall over that edge. Bond is much harder to romanticize—he was never going to end up "one of the guys" like Bill Wyman. He is—like