Caldera: The Best Fusion Band you Never Hear About.

The best way to describe Caldera is to Take equal parts of Weather Report and Return to Forever, and then add a heavy dose of authentic Latin funk.

 In Fact, next to Caldera, Weather Report seems overrated, especially the more commercial oriented late 70's early 80's version of that band.

I also thought that Weather Report's "funk" could be dry and lifeless, even with Jaco Pastorious' chops on bass. For some reason the later WR just seemed like lite jazz to me.

Caldera only had 4 albums from 76'to 79', the self titled debut, Sky Islands, Time and Chance and Dreamer, but nothing light weight about the Latin fire that melds with the Return to Forever like chops.

I think Santana mixed with RTF would be another apt description of Caldera, just a touch of Earth Wind and Fire shows up now and then as well.

All four of the albums are worth owning, each building on the last, and never watering down the latin jazz funk fusion.

Unfortunately in their day, Caldera never hit the big time, even today most of the catalog is is unreleased on CD, and only a few imports show up in the secondary market at extreme prices on Amazon.com