It was 1970 or 1971 when I stumbled onto KQED-TV's feature on Don Ellis and his orchestra performing his New Horizons at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. This was broadcast on our local affiliate of West Virginia public television and I had somehow missed the credits. Had no idea what I just seen or heard. But it grabbed me at that first hearing and I'd spend the next forty-five years trying to find out what it was. Google and PBS's web site to the rescue! The DVD starts with a series of interviews from those who knew Ellis and admired both his adventurous aesthetic and his personality. Some good music interspersed here in brief clips filmed live at jazz festivals from the late 1960s. Also included are some trailers for additional documentaries on such artists as Joe Zawinul. I haven't explored those yet.But it was the DVD "Bonus" feature that made this purchase worth the price for me. There in all their monaural glory were Ellis and his orchestra performing tracks from his "Electric Bath" album, starting with the remarkable 17/4 (or 17/8?) "New Horizons." This was what had so affected me forty-five years ago.The video quality is about what you'd expect from tapes that are almost a half-century old. We're fortunate that some few of them have survived and remained (mostly) playable. The audio is monaural and the museum acoustics must have been pretty "live." Add to that the fact that Ellis had nearly his entire ensemble miked with each section outfitted with multiple amps and speakers. The balance is not always ideal and the percussion instruments sometimes overwhelm the rest of the orchestra. And there a few dropouts here and there. But this is a minor quibble. The music sounds pretty darn good considering the venue and the age of the tapes, the orchestra plays with palpable energy, and Ellis's mastery of his instrument and those "alien" time signatures (think northern Africa, the Indian Subcontinent, the peasant dances of the Balkans) is without equal. If you're like me and groove to the rhythms of Bartok's more energetic music, there's nothing in Ellis that you'll find off-putting. On the more reflective side, the ascending stacked fifths in "Open Beauty" are reminiscent of the haunting string chorale that opens the second movement of Bartok's second piano concerto. And the musicians seem able to swing in just about any meter, be it 17, 7 ... whatever. I'd recommend this to anyone who is curious about Ellis and his experiments with world music and who wonders, as I do, why his name is so-little recognized.But please don't hold the outfits he and his musicians wear against us baby-boomers. It was the Sixties, after all. Yahadta be there.