If you've followed the beats of his half-century career, you'll know Vernon Reid as an artist who paints in every colour. Depending on the era you dive into and the album on your turntable, you'll find the New York polymath pinballing between jazz, metal, punk, funk, electronica and hip-hop, cutting heads with collaborators as eclectic as Mick Jagger and Public Enemy, endlessly shedding his skin yet always speaking his truth.

This is an important record because it vividly and effectively captures a specific moment in the history of jazz. We are at the beginning of the 80s; jazz is experiencing new transformations; a fluid period in which not only its expressive intentions but also its audience are changing. The rhythmic intensity that pervades the entire album certainly evokes the spasmodic struggle for life of bebop, but also of a much more contemporary world. And then, most important, there is the embrace with the European musical spirit. “Perpetual Groove” remains unique in its surprising freshness. Something that is good to know exists and smacks of resistant revolutionarity.

Produced when pianist-composer Armen Donelian was not yet 30 years old, Stargazer—his debut recording as a leader—was released in 1981 on a small Japanese record label and only available elsewhere as a hard-to-find import. Until now, that is. On October 3, Donelian’s longtime label Sunnyside Records will reissue Stargazer, a stunning and remarkably assured trio date with bassist Eddie Gomez and drummer Billy Hart, for the first time in nearly 45 years.