EDQ* – They All Be On This Old Road

 

(OG 410)

 

Track listing: Naima/Dede-Bup-Bup/Nancy (With The Laughing Face)/Easy Living-Overdoing It-Not Too Much

 

Elton Dean (alto sax and saxello), Keith Tippett (piano), Chris Laurence** (bass), Louis Moholo-Moholo (drums).

 

Recorded at the Seven Dials, Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London WC2, on 18 November 1976. Released: May 1977. Recorded by Ron Barron. Producers: Keith Beal and Elton Dean. Cover painting: John Christopherson.

 

(*front cover and spine say “EDQ,” the labels credit “ELTON DEAN QUARTET”)

(**surname misspelt on sleeve as “LAWRENCE”)

 

What initially attracted me to the writing of Paul Morley in the NME was the second live review that he wrote. The first was of Buzzcocks, but the second was of Elton Dean’s quartet at Manchester’s Band On The Wall. On that evening the quartet comprised Dean, Keith Tippett, their regular bassist Harry Miller and, sitting in for an unavailable Louis Moholo-Moholo at the drums, fellow ex-Soft Machinist (indeed, at that time still primarily a Soft Machinist) John Marshall.

 

Morley’s thoughts, and the way he expressed them, hooked thirteen-year-old me instantly. As somebody who was at the time enthusiastically getting into what we would now call for want of a better phrase free jazz – it really did prove inadequate in the end – and hadn’t heard that much punk rock, it was striking to be informed that yes, what was happening in the world(s) of British-based free improvisation (and Derek Bailey, Trevor Watts and others were cited as exemplars) was just as much, if not more, punk than the punks. It helped orientate me, and when Lol Coxhill recorded and toured with the Damned several months later, it resembled the fulfilling of a prophecy.

 

Hence They All Be On This Old Road, which came out about six weeks after the first Clash album, became something of a beacon of guidance to me, and, as happened in Manchester, one member of the regular quartet was unable to perform at the Seven Dials for its recording. On this occasion it was Harry Miller who couldn’t make it, and so a dep was called for.

 

The album could fairly have been titled The Popular Elton Dean, since it includes the quartet’s quite drastic reinterpretations of several standards. But its boldest move was, not merely to commence with, but devote the entirety of its first side to, a twenty-minute exploration of Coltrane’s “Naima.” At the time such a notion was still felt slightly blasphemous, like retooling The Bible. Yet all four players enter into the song’s harmonic and emotional chambers thoroughly.

 

At first Dean and Tippett restrict themselves to expressing and improvising directly on the main theme, while it is the restless, ambiguous rhythm section that is endeavouring to stir things up. But the most immediate thing I noticed was the rather startling playing of Chris Laurence – the dep for Miller, and I would argue, for the purposes of this record, the most important of these four musicians.

 

Why? Laurence has, over the decades, worked with a panoply of musicians, from Michael Nyman to Joni Mitchell, from Lena Horne to Morrissey. He has been a key member of the Academy of Ancient Music at St Martin’s-in-the-Fields under Sir Neville Marriner. But apart from appearing with Barry Guy’s London Jazz Composers’ Orchestra on Ode and working on some of Mike Westbrook’s key projects (indeed, on Metropolis and parts of Marching Song, he worked with Harry Miller in a double rhythm section setting), he has generally concentrated on modern mainstream-with-interests-in-free jazz, working long-term with the likes of John Surman, Kenny Wheeler and Norma Winstone.

 

But, on They All Be On This Old Road, it has to be said that Laurence is absolutely on fire, and the different environment that his playing sets up audibly influences the directions that the other three musicians take. On “Naima” alone he immediately sets up high-register conversations. He pings, bends and plunges like Tom Daley dives. Quite frequently – as happens when he gets to his own solo space in “Naima” – he can become aggressive and percussively violent.

 

Meanwhile, Dean’s alto investigates all the nooks and crevices that Coltrane’s melody opens up, with Tippett constantly echoing and challenging at the piano. Conventional beginnings expand into pointillistic hyperactivity then explode with savage rawness before settling back into troubled lyricism. Dean’s alto playing, I’d say, sits about midway between the hard-won romanticism of Mike Osborne and the febrile expressionism of Trevor Watts (he rarely brushes the extremes of either). Finally, after the song has been put thoroughly through the wringer (or, as Dean remarks in his brief, matey liner note, “respectfully stretched”), the theme is restated, although innocence has now yielded to experience as Dean yodels and ululates towards an emotional climax which also serves as an elegy and tribute; in November 1976 Coltrane was still less than ten years gone, and his absence was keenly felt by everyone.

 

Overall, the quartet’s “Naima” is a startling performance which fully deserved to be heard beyond the faithful Seven Dials patrons; it is a literal reworking which, rather than subvert, demolish or mock Coltrane’s conception, serves to emphasise why he, and this song, remained so important.

 

Hard to follow. But side two launches with Dean’s own boppish theme “Dede-Bup-Bup” which, again from fairly normal post-tune post-bop procedurals, the saxophonist, along with Tippett, steadily begins to unravel, moving patiently into free-ish territory, alto and piano chasing each other up and down the harmonic scale like merry kittens before suddenly erupting in the manner of impatient volcanoes. Then Tippett embarks on what will turn out to be one of the most frightening piano solos I have ever heard; settling on a pedal-driven lower register rumbling of thunder, he impassively builds the storm up and up to the point where it seems about to erupt into apocalypse and destruction – you really think that he’s about to take an axe to the poor instrument – before he suddenly slides the storm up the keys with a flourish then stops in time for Dean to restate the original theme.

 

There follows an odd sequence of familiar favourites. Mention is made in Dean’s liner notes about “an evening of ballads” and a quick run through “Nancy” – the only time (co-writer) Phil Silvers ever got mentioned on an Ogun album – seems to confirm this, along with an initially bucolic saxello-led waltz through “Easy Living,” with Dean getting into some very Surman-esque waters of choppiness as his solo proceeds, and Tippett in, of all things, a Chris McGregor mood, his kwela-derived block chords fitting in very easily. But then the playing implodes into a series of semi-free tropes; I’m not entirely sure where “Easy Living” ends and “Overdoing It” (credited to Laurence and Moholo-Moholo) or “Not Too Much” (Dean and Tippett) begin, except to say that out-and-out free detonations alternate with grand modal swellings. There is one final ecstatic rise to heaven from all four men – I haven’t said much about Moholo-Moholo, but damn he’s there when he’s needed, which is pretty much all the time, and nobody, not even Art Blakey, rimshots like he does (see the points in “Naima” when he does) – which proves a fittingly cathartic climax to the record. The compere announces the players, the audience is audibly happy, everyone off to catch the night bus to nirvana.

 

Current availability: the album was reissued on CD and download in November 2021, with the above performances bookmarked by four other recordings from the same concert – “Edeeupub,” “Here’s That Rainy Day,” “Attic” and “Echoes” - which had only recently been discovered. As these four recordings last about forty minutes between them, this effectively gives us a whole new album.

 

I am not entirely certain what the precise running order of the Seven Dials concert was, except that it probably commenced with “Edeeupub” and concluded with the “Easy Living” triptych. And the newly-discovered recordings are without exception fascinating and illuminating listening, and I’m very glad that Ogun have managed to make them readily available; as usual, they have also worked wonders on the sound quality of the original L.P., which is now improved immeasurably.

 

That having been said, it has also to be stated that it was probably not the best idea to begin the performance, or indeed this album, with “Edeeupub.” Make no mistake; these are thirteen or so absolutely engrossing minutes of music making, even if the listener is initially a bit mystified by the piece’s determinate abstractions – what exactly are Elton and Keith up to here? Midway through Tippett’s solo, he builds up a huge drone-like figure at the bottom end of his keyboard. This becomes almost electronic in nature – at points we could be listening to an Autechre recital – and as it steadily rumbles towards totalitarian dissonance, Tippett…suddenly shuts it off, swoops up the keyboard and gives way to Elton.

 

Then it strikes you, as does the partially anagrammatic title – this is a reconstitution of “Dede-Bup-Bup”! It both sets the stage for and clears up any misunderstandings regarding the latter. But it never really breaks out of take-no-prisoners free-form austerity – Dean’s very subtle thematic variations notwithstanding – and it reminds me of how so many musicians on that scene effectively shot themselves in the foot by coming on and DOING THE DIFFICULT BIT FIRST. Whereas it’s so much more effective to begin with the easy bits – “Easy Living,” if you will – then gradually immerse your listeners into the adventure, but then maybe there’s something fundamental I don’t get about the symbiotic relationship between improvising musicians and their audiences.

 

“Here’s That Rainy Day” mostly consists of a shuffling and at times very African percussion-style duet between bass and drums before Dean and Tippett come in with a slightly acrid theme statement. But Dean’s own “Attic” really is thirteen minutes of the business, a fundamentally conventional ballad (which does speed up towards the end) which Dean and Tippett in particular play and improvise upon in a comparatively straight way. It isn’t until we’re halfway through Tippett’s solo until he begins to experiment with rhythm and tonality. The whole thing is rather like Stan Tracey’s seventies quartet on performance-enhancing steroids. There’s a real spirit of discovery at work here and it’s the perfect way to usher any casual listener into the EDQ world – I would definitely have put this, rather than “Edeeupub,” at the beginning.

 

The album, as it now stands, concludes with “Echoes,” a Keith Tippett theme performed plaintively by Dean’s saxello and which sounds oddly familiar – again, you eventually realise that this is (or will turn into) the closing theme from Frames by Tippett’s Ark (see OGD 003/004) but Dean’s group recites it in the manner of one of those no-longer-troubled meditations that conclude some Coltrane records (“After The Rain”) and, like the rain, Tippett’s upper register flourishes, like fluctuant stars in the sky, fade from our senses, leaving us with only sense.

HARRY MILLER’S ISIPINGO – Family Affair

 

(OG 310)

 

Track listing: Family Affair/Touch Hungry/Jumping/Eli’s Song

 

Harry Miller (bass), Mark Charig (trumpet), Mike Osborne (alto sax), Malcolm Griffiths (trombone), Keith Tippett (piano), Louis Moholo-Moholo (drums).

 

Recorded at Battersea Arts Centre, London SW11, on 6 January 1977. Released: summer 1977. Producers: Harry Miller and Keith Beal. Cover design: Niklaus Troxler (sorry Niklaus but I don’t think you could get away with a cover like that today!)

 

Isipingo had already been going for two or three years by the time of Family Affair’s release, with a variety of line-ups. The central idea was to provide a group focus for Harry Miller’s compositional and organisational skills and a scaled-down, more intimate and perhaps more directly rhythmic variation on the Brotherhood Of Breath’s kwela/jazz model. In the basic sextet format Miller tried out all sorts of combinations of musicians from gig to gig but none really seemed to gel. The most successful one featured Mongezi Feza and Nick Evans alongside Osborne, Tippett and Moholo-Moholo, and can be heard to good effect on Which Way Now (Cuneiform Records, 2006), but that particular performance was recorded about three-and-a-half weeks before Feza’s death and the problem therefore reasserted itself.

 

Miller finally resolved this dilemma by bringing Mark Charig and his old Westbrook/Brotherhood associate Malcolm Griffiths into the band. This was a very artful balance reflecting the bassist’s recently history and mixing elements of Westbrook, McGregor, Tippett and Osborne’s music in with Miller’s own, and the combination gelled quite beautifully.

 

Family Affair, the only Isipingo album to be released in the band’s lifetime, was taped live on a drizzly, foggy Thursday evening in early 1977. Punk was in the air, or at least on the other side of the Thames in Chelsea and Notting Hill, but nobody yet really knew what to do about it. January 1977 was the time of Buzzcocks’ Spiral Scratch E.P., but only just; it didn’t come out until 29 January and the twenty million people who claim to have bought it at the time very probably didn’t - the band could only afford to press a thousand copies, five of which found their way to Listen Records in Glasgow’s Renfield Street about three weeks after its release, retailing at a steep 99p. I bought one of them (because I’d read about it in the NME and heard Peel playing “Boredom” on Radio 1, in those pre-internet days), think Jim Kerr and Alan McGee bought one each and have no idea what happened with the remaining two. BUT YOU’RE NOT HERE TO READ ABOUT PUNK ROCK so on with Family Affair.

 

My point is that things were happening, and there are different stripes of rebel music. Despite the tinny, crappy upright pub piano assigned by Battersea Arts Centre to Keith Tippett – or perhaps because of it, forcing him to become even more creative within the instrument’s technical limitations – Family Affair is a superbly-choreographed band performance, and one of the jewels in Ogun’s crown, spotlighting as it does six jazz improvisers at the very top of their game…or, in the case of one of them, possibly hurtling right back down to the bottom, but more of that in a moment.

 

The record begins with the easy kwela strut of the title track, Moholo-Moholo audibly having a ball with his ride and rimshot refrains (his unshakeable consistency here puts me in mind of Jaki Liebezeit with Can) as the catchy riff leads into solos by Griffiths, whose playing is romantic yet occasionally discursive, Charig, who seems intent on recapturing Feza’s ghost with his snarling triple-tonguing and hyperactive half-valve shrieks before settling back into his more familiar meditative melancholy – and Tippett doubles up and multiplies supporting piano figures beneath, or alongside, the trumpeter – and Osborne, who leads the ensemble into a free section. This transitions into further free play, with Osborne and Charig swapping figures and ideas over a patient-sounding rhythm section – again, Charig sounds very much like Mongs to begin with before switching to a touch of the Harry Becketts. The interplay builds up naturally as Griffiths modestly enters on the sideline and comments before launching into an extended solo of his own, initially deploying plunger mute but later becoming open; the overall feeling is that of a hungover and slightly disappointed Vic Dickenson (actually that’s much more characteristic of Paul Rutherford’s trombone playing*; Griff was always a Lawrence Brown man).

 

*(Rutherford worked intermittently with Isipingo. At one performance – was it at Lancaster or Loughborough University? – the band supported Brotherhood Of Breath, and since Chris McGregor himself happened to be playing piano for Isipingo on that occasion, he invited the trombonist to join in with the Brotherhood since he didn’t want Rutherford to feel left out. It was Rutherford’s only performance with the big band, and the only time the Brotherhood used three trombonists. He enjoyed himself.)

 

Around Griffiths’ playing, Tippett worries away at a small cycle of upper-register piano notes and the rhythm section doubles and halves the tempo with immense, virtually telepathic ease. Eventually the main theme – a bright, bouncy trumpet-led midtempo 4/4 refrain somewhere between Herb Alpert and Hugh Masekela – asserts itself before rapidly disappearing.

 

On the album there are no gaps; each track flows immediately into the next (this is obviously more evident on the CD edition). Hence we jump directly into the nearly fifteen-and-a-half minute-long “Jumping,” a pinnacle of seventies jazz group improvisation. It commences with its fast, boppish theme which immediately dissolves to allow Osborne, Tippett and the rhythm to come through.

 

And what is there to say about Osborne (and Tippett)’s solo(s) on “Jumping”? You won’t derive many clues from Brian Case’s typically gnomish, gaunt and minimalist liner note, as usual lying somewhere between Damon Runyan and Derek Raymond. But this is an absolute peak of emotional improvising. Osborne begins very close to the theme but Tippett is already on his tail, intent on avoiding the solo turning into a Mike Osborne Trio performance, and not only never lets up, but on occasion also leads. The furious crisscrossing between alto and piano recalls a more hyperactive variant of the Osborne/Stan Tracey duo.

 

The intensity continues to thicken to the point where it becomes actively terrifying, as if something is about to explode. And explode it does; Osborne finds a false-register high note, hangs on to it for his life…then Tippett responds with a high note (the same one) of his own before demonically diving into deep, rich whirlpools of modal chords which recall Vaughan Williams as deeply as McCoy Tyner. Together, Osborne and Tippett convert the jaunty bop number into a church of near-medieval lamentation, out of tempo and eternal in its wounded fealty. This is an expression of raw pain, the music of artists who are hurting, and in the context of seventies jazz is nearly unique. Bass (bowed) and drums can only cascade behind them like distant waves, and the other two horns blow as though in a different and unreachable galaxy.

 

Osborne’s solo concludes, and Tippett’s sustain pedal fountain of descending scales abruptly turn into jittery pointillism to accompany Griffiths’ nervy, rhythm-dominant solo. Again the pianist is there all the way with the main soloist, and when it comes to his own solo, he makes the Battersea Arts Centre pop-musicians-only piano sound like a kalimba as he works over and over on a repeating cycle of notes, akin to the works of Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou played at sextuple speed and – I think (let me know in the comments section if he doesn’t; it might just be the state of the piano) – utilises the simultaneous plucking of piano strings and fast upper register keyboard runs. I don’t think any improvising pianist anywhere in the mid-seventies world, with the possible and partial exception of Cecil Taylor, was as actively and untiringly creative as Tippett was at his peak. This is a level of creativity that expands somewhere above “outstanding.” Typically, when Charig arrives for his concluding solo, Tippett mostly lays back and lets him blow unimpeded. Remind me…this was supposed to be bop?

 

But even “Jumping” isn’t as sheerly overwhelming as “Eli’s Song,” the album’s final and shortest track, a sad 6/8 waltz feature for Osborne. As an expression of pained terror and a mind at the end of its tether, Osborne’s solo is very nearly up there with Parker’s “Lover Man.” I am aware that he had already been long diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and was briefly sectioned at the Maudsley as a result. He also had a heroin habit and, as the drummer Steve Noble once told me, was fully capable of emptying the entire contents of a hotel bar in the space of fifteen minutes.

 

The single most terrifying moment in Osborne’s “Eli’s Song” solo is when he finds a scream of a high note and savagely alternates it with a growling low note as though his brain were spilling out of his head. His playing is at times barely articulate – what a contrast to the clean, defined tones he used in Westbrook’s various bands. I can’t call it exultation (as I would do with, say, Kurt Cobain’s scream at the climax of the MTV “Where Did You Sleep Last Night”) because all I hear is a loud, elongated cry for help, confirmation of a disintegrating identity. This is the sound of a man falling apart, and the final ensemble theme abruptly shuts down, like a lid on a tomb ready for nailing.

 

There is a supreme confidence in the six musicians’ interaction throughout Family Affair. But only two of those six survive at the time of writing. Their absolute command as an interactive group emphasises their fragility, and perhaps also their fury. The album remains one of British-based jazz’s most outstanding recordings, and some of the players arguably did not surpass what they did on it. But in its febrile way, it is as angry as any punk rockers had a right to be – and maybe they had a lot more right to be angry.

 

Current availability: Reissued as part of Harry Miller’s The Collection 3-CD package in 1999 (it’s been out of print for a good long while) but more recently made available as a download.

MIKE OSBORNE/STAN TRACEY - Tandem: Live At The Bracknell Festival

 

(OG 210)

 

Track listing: Ballad Forms/Air On A Shoestring/Back To Berks

 

Mike Osborne (alto sax), Stan Tracey (piano).

 

Tracks 1 & 2 recorded where the title implies they were recorded, on 24 July 1976; track 3 recorded at South Hill Park, Bracknell, on 26 November 1976. Released: spring 1977. Recorded by Doug Gleave; produced by Keith Beal, Mike Osborne and Stan Tracey.  Cover design: Nikolas Troxler.

 

A few years ago – in truth it was probably almost a quarter of a century ago - I watched a BBC documentary about Stan Tracey which rather smugly brushed over his brief involvement with free improvisation in the seventies. I thought it rather insulting and belittling to brush that entire phase of the pianist’s development under the “what were we thinking?” carpet. The revisionist wankers who put the documentary together were doubtless obeisant to the “thinking” of eighties fashionista spivs who were only interested in nice suits, rather than the music, as a consequence of which many musicians of Tracey’s generation and the one after found it suddenly impossible to find much work on the circuit. I haven’t forgotten the names of the spivs, nor the subsequent sweaty efforts of certain of their number to “grow” and “expand their musical horizons.”

 

This non-theory is detonated by two catalysts; firstly, although he was never going to be a doctrinaire hardcore free improviser, Tracey’s contributions to the music were genuine, curious and, for the most part, both fun and profound. It was the younger generation of players that arose in sixties Britain, ready to take on the world, who helped rescue Tracey from being Postman Stan of Streatham (although it was primarily his third wife Jackie who in 1970 proclaimed “YOU ARE NOT A POSTMAN” and set about his jazz “rehabilitation” - his problems were arguably as much to do with a heroin addiction as it was to changing fashions in jazz), and both parties were eager to learn from each other and genuinely expand their musical horizons. Secondly, recorded work in the 2000s with Louis Moholo-Moholo (see OGCD 016) and Evan Parker (Crevulations, released on Parker’s PSI label) proved that Tracey’s interest in free playing had not diminished.

 

From the seventies onwards Tracey had three duos on the go with each of the S.O.S. team of saxophonists – Osborne, John Surman (Sonatinas, released on the Traceys’ Steam label in 1978 and yet to see a reissue, is a pretty remarkable record and, in “Summer Hobo,” also includes the then-current theme to BBC Radio 3’s Jazz Today) and (the most conventional and longest-lasting) Alan Skidmore.

 

Yet the duo with Osborne was unquestionably the most intense of the three. The two men had already released a fine album on Cadillac Records (Original, recorded at Surrey Hall, Stockwell, in April 1972) and, like most agglomerations of British jazz musicians, worked as and when time and economics permitted it.

 

Tandem’s two main tracks represent what Osborne and Tracey played at the 1976 Bracknell Jazz Festival on a steaming hot Saturday afternoon towards the end of July. Annotator Steve Lake’s description of “Ballad Forms” on the album’s rear sleeve is so good and thorough that it might render any further attempts to describe it as redundant. All that needs to be added is that the twenty-three minutes and forty seconds of the work constitute one of the greatest recorded improvisations in the history of jazz music, British or otherwise.

 

Unlike some improvisers I could (but won’t) mention, Tracey saw free improvisation as an opportunity to create a spontaneous structure that stuck pretty closely to what he regarded as jazz. He never threw the harmony and melody babies out with the bathwater. The comedian Bob Monkhouse, who first met him in ENSA in the forties when Tracey was still an aspiring accordionist, and who subsequently became a very close friend of his, remarked that he knew Tracey was a genius in 1947, when he saw that the pianist could rattle off a dozen valid improvisations on a basic melody.

 

This gift stood Tracey in great stead, particularly in the seventies; the CD reissue of his Octet’s The Bracknell Connection (also commissioned and recorded in 1976) includes a nearly twenty-minute-long bonus track, “Chiffik,” in which an entire Octet number is improvised; Tracey begins it alone at the piano and, utilising his deep knowledge of harmony and what chords or notes should follow what, strikes upon a riff which the rhythm section, followed by the horns, then take up – there are impromptu unison lines and turns for soloists, and it all works phenomenally well.

 

It is the same with “Ballad Forms,” which sounds like an extended meditation on almost all forms of jazz (together with occasional intrusions from twentieth-century classical and Indian ragas). Proceeding on a modified train-kept-a-runnin’ locomotive rhythm, the two players go through West Coast bucolics, jitterbug waltzes, stride jumps, Coltrane modality and, at emotionally strategic points, out-and-out free playing. But not once is the listener led to imagine that these gentlemen do not know what they’re doing or why they’re doing it.

 

The telepathy and interplay between these musicians are uncanny. Throughout the piece, piano and saxophone move as one, although quite a lot of the time it is Tracey’s piano which is, slightly surprisingly, doing most of the pushing. But the way in which they respond to each other and advance their own responses so swiftly and instinctively approaches magic. They are constructing a piece of music, fully aware of everything that has preceded them (for an interesting counterpoint, see the title track of The People’s Republic by the Revolutionary Ensemble from the same year, which endeavours to summarise the entire history of music!).

 

There has been little in recorded music as overwhelming as the final couple of minutes of “Ballad Forms” where Osborne takes up a motif from Mingus’ “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat” and Tracey immediately furnishes harmonic support. It is as though love and happiness had been rescued from an otherwise consuming inferno. Such a deep sadness, too, in Osborne’s playing, but not a hopeless one. It sounds, at the end, as if music had been…saved.

 

“Air On A Shoestring” was the encore performance and is rather speedier and more jagged an improvisation, though again finally settles on a lightly swinging melody. “Back To Berks,” recorded at another (audibly less populated) concert five months later, is noticeably darker, Tracey sweeping off on a Rimsky-Korsakov gallop and daring the altoist to keep up. This climaxes in echoey pits of Poe doom before coming back to something between a township melody and good old boogie woogie – although the emotional trapdoor will slam shut again before either performer is done.

 

But “Ballad Forms” is Tandem’s main event, a beautiful example of how a work of art can be built into existence by artists who believe that it can be built. Listening to it now, I of course think of Streatham – Tracey in Mount Ephraim Road, Osborne further up on Prentis Road – and try not to think of the saxophonist being a doomed soul. But I also think of life versus existence, and there was only ever going to be one winner.

 

Current availability: Out of print, but this in my view demands reissuing more than any other currently unavailable Ogun album. A divided solo (Tracey)/duo 1974 performance at Wigmore Hall, Alone & Together, has been made available on Cadillac, but really Tandem is up there with Under Milk Wood and Citadel/Room 315 as one of British jazz’s very finest moments. Listen to the record on YouTube and see what I mean.