What Mosaic does best is to take a segment of a musician's career, and then draw together musical documentation that complements previously issued performances (obscure and well-known) with unissued ones. This set fills two such gaps brilliantly. First, it offers a far fuller picture of the Mingus sextet with Eric Dolphy than the one tantalisingly offered on the Cornell Concert from March 1964, which was first released by Blue Note in 2007. We now have not only Dolphy's appearance with Mingus from Amsterdam, on 10 April, but also a complete concert (two CDs' worth) from NY Town Hall on 4 April, of which only two tracks had previously seen the light of day. Secondly, for those of us who loved the Liberty LP of My Favorite Quintet – the band with Lonnie Hillyer and Charles McPherson – there is a completely new set of material from the Minneapolis concert that yielded the original album. As a bonus there's a Monterey show from September 1965 including a quarter of an hour of unheard recordings. So is this new material worth having? The answer is an unequivocal yes, with a searing Dolphy bass clarinet solo on a new 11-minute version of ‘Fables of Faubus’, and some inspired soloing from Johnny Coles (for once on mic) on ‘Parkeriana’. The Parker theme recurs on ‘Bird Preamble’, a dazzling 17-minute piece with Hillyer and McPherson that is Mingus's demonstration that “the avant garde can't play Bird yet.” It opens with one of a series of fine bass solos that show the leader at the top of his game, and proceeds into familiar ensemble Parker territory, cut and pasted into an aural collage. And for proof of Mingus's Ellingtonian roots, an unexpected bonus is his Blantonesque duo with Jaki Byard on ‘Sophisticated Lady’ also out for the first time. Overall, the seven CDs here offer great insight into the Mingus/Byard/Richmond rhythm team, their flexibility and dynamism, and above all their ability to adapt perfectly to some of the most individual and creative soloists of the 1960s.