In his book, Beyond Jazz, Trevor Barre points to this 1974 summit at London’s Wigmore Hall as being the decisive moment when British free musicians could at last begin to stand alongside their US counterparts on an equal footing. And despite some embryonic disagreements over procedural approach – Braxton’s tendency towards composition, Bailey angling for all out improvisation – these performances of compromise find two singular talents sharing the weight of the dialogue in disparate, forked and flickering tongues. Within this spontaneous study of a shared etymology it’s difficult to locate anywhere the “dialogue of the deaf” suggested by one British critic in the informative liner notes. Rather the cracked codex of drawn-out tones, asthmatic wheezes and spidery seizures form the grammatical code of an infant language spoken assuredly by both men, punctuated by pauses and components colonised from the post-tonal shores of serialism. Priming the pitch for an entirely global aesthetic/non-aesthetic is a pretty big deal (it would be a couple more years before Company was up and running); that such a salient move sounds as inspired as this only adds to this reissue’s considerable cachet.