Anyone fortunate enough to have caught the Morgan/Shorter/Timmons/Merritt Messengers when they toured the UK in May 1961 with The Thelonious Monk Quartet will have experienced something close to a revelatory religious experience. Without question, along with the Horace Silver Quintet of the same period, this amounted to the pinnacle of hard-bop. The fierce sounding 1961 sessions that produced the Pisces album took place just three months before The Messengers arrived in Europe, but remained unreleased for some time. Perhaps the most familiar track here is the UK jazz dance hit ‘Ping Pong’ (the live 1962 Riverside version) while the Lee Morgan penned title track has an almost cinematic aura being slow and lingering with thoughtful solos from both Morgan and Shorter. Elsewhere, both hornmen continually push one another to achieve many white-hot trade offs. (‘United’, ‘Uptight’, etc). With six additional performances from the same sessions plus a sleeve note that explains the background as to who did what to whom thus making it a compulsory acquisition