The third and last volume in the 2007 Jazz Connections anthology containing each and every one of alto saxophonist Jackie McLean's pre-Blue Note recordings opens with six pieces originally released as the Prestige album Alto Madness. Recorded on May 3, 1957, this LP came out of the same day's work as the album Bird Feathers, a five-alto tribute to Charlie Parker that combined the ideas and energies of John Jenkins, Gene Quill, Hal McKusick, Phil Woods, and Jackie McLean. For Alto Madness McLean paired off with Jenkins in front of pianist Wade Legge, bassist Doug Watkins, and drummer Art Taylor. Although the Charlie Parker influence was a central element in early modern jazz, McLean's tenure with Charles Mingus in 1956 forced him to transcend what he learned from Bird and redefine his own sound, as Mingus told him "I don't want Charlie Parker, man, I want Jackie". McLean, whose style was forged in direct contact with Bird, Miles Davis, Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk, and John Coltrane, would return to Mingus for the Blues and Roots session of 1959 and find himself working shoulder to shoulder with John Handy, Booker Ervin, and Pepper Adams, while Mingus was saying things like "Forget changes, forget what key you're in--all notes are right". The paths that led to that kind of freely structured experimentation were already teeming with creative ideas during the year 1957. McLean polished off the year with three adventuresome albums; Strange Blues and Makin' the Changes came together during the summer and were issued by Prestige, followed in December by the Jubilee records release Fat Jazz, the only album reissued in this series that was recorded in New York rather than Hackensack, N.J. Fat Jazz would be the veritable bridge between McLean's Prestige/New Jazz and Blue Note periods. All three albums featured trumpeter Webster Young; Strange Blues and Fat Jazz brought back tuba man Ray Draper, and Changes dealt in trombonist Curtis Fuller. The table was set for McLean's Blue Notes, a canon of gloriously inspired works for which everyone ought to prepare themselves by absorbing all three volumes of this amazing early Jackie McLean retrospective.