Before Megadeth, Chris Poland and Gar Samuelson were in a jazz fusion band that never released a record. Forty eight years later, that record exists.
Low-Temperature Delay is a twelve inch of studio demos and live tracks by The New Yorkers, out at the end of the year on Psychic Reader Records in New York, with a fold out poster and a booklet of photographs and notes.
The band formed in 1978, after Poland and the brothers Gar and Stew Samuelson left Dunkirk, New York for Los Angeles, and filled out with Robertino Pagliari on fretless bass and Don Roper on saxophone. They took from Mahavishnu Orchestra, Weather Report and Return to Forever but left the keyboards out and ran two guitars instead. There were sessions, a local following and a meeting with a major label. Nothing came out.
What did come out, six years later, was the playing on Killing Is My Business and Peace Sells: two jazz musicians dropped into Dave Mustaine's riffs, which is most of the reason those two albums still sound unlike anything around them.
“It was everything we could do just to keep up,” Poland said of the earlier band. Samuelson died in 1999, at 41.