Slow change

Music for all time from the Blue Note album Now! by LA's late, great Bobby Hutcherson.  

The personnel:

Bobby Hutcherson - vibes
Harold Land - tenor saxophone
Stanley Cowell - piano, electric piano
Wally Richardson - guitar
Herbie Lewis - bass
Joe Chambers - drums
Candido Camero - congas, bongo
Gene McDaniels - lead vocals
Eileen Gilbert, Christine Spencer, Maeretha Stewart - backing vocals

Gene McDaniels (who also went professionally by his full name, Eugene Booker McDaniels) has a co-writing credit with Bobby Hutcherson for the lyrics*:

Free soul soul free touch me feel you change
Locked door lost key touch me heal you change
Free soul soul free touch me free me
Catch the spiral falling upward
God is watching, God is dying, slow change

Here's footage of McDaniels from an earlier stage in his career with his hit Point of No Return on the syndicated musical variety program Hollywood a Go Go.

McDaniels' record was by many accounts the last song playing on the Dallas Radio station K-LIF before news reports of President Kennedy's assassination interrupted the programming.  A somewhat eerily appropriate coincidence, if true.  

As if that wasn't enough immortality, Gene McDaniels also wrote Roberta Flack's attention-grabbing grand entrance on the music scene, the amazing first track on the first side of her first album, First Take, Compared to What:

(He also wrote Flack's Feel Like Makin' Love.) (Not Bad Company's.)

At the end of a full life that makes for lively reading on Wikipedia, McDaniels spent the rest of his days living a self-described hermit's life in Kittery, Maine, where he made YouTube videos on various subjects, including the below about Les McCann and Eddie Harris's orginal version of the Roberta Flack cover of the above:

For even more McDaniels lore from an aficionado, go here.

[Update August 2018:] And finally, this late addition:

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* More than half the time I hear "song" where the lyrics have "soul", but I'm going with the web consensus on this because it makes poetic sense and I sometimes hear it too.