Alone among the other great jazz labels of the 1960s and 1970s—Blue Note, Prestige, Riverside, Impulse!, Strata-East and Atlantic—Joe Fields' Muse is rarely anthologised, written about or otherwise celebrated. Yet like its peers, Muse was prolific, releasing over 200 premium-grade albums during the 1970s, its most active decade, alone.

This relative obscurity is partly explained by the diversity of Muse's catalogue, which spanned hard bop, post bop, politically informed spiritual jazz, straight-ahead, vocal jazz, Latin jazz, avant-garde, jazz rock and funk-informed jazz and R&B hybrids, and so was resistant to the affixing of the sort of simplistic identity beloved by journalists.

Fields recognised the fact in an interview he gave in 2014. "I'm music-orientated but also sales-orientated," said Fields. "If you are an ECM label and you are making ECM music, you are catering strictly for those people. But if you are Muse type label, you might do a Houston Person album that is in one direction and then do a Carlos Garnett that is way off into another direction. It was always important for me to find a balance and to cater to the many different tastes in jazz." Fields added: "You can't be all things to all people, but you can make everything of quality in its own particular groove."

Born in New Jersey in 1929, Fields set up Muse in 1972, having begun his career as a salesman for Columbia in the 1950s. In the 1960s he worked for Verve under