In the years leading up to this live set recorded at The Klinker in South London during the summer of 2000, Derek Bailey's records with Pat Metheny, Tony Williams, Jamaaladeen Tacuma and the Birmingham-based DJ Ninj had put his idea of what improvised music was, and who he needed to play with, under the investigative microscope. Although performing that night under the familiar tag of ‘Derek Bailey & Company’, his performance at The Klinker also dealt up a degree of stylistic incongruity. Simon H Fell and Mark Wastell were associated at the time with reductionist improvisation, while tap-dancer Will Gaines (then 72) had a history that stretched back to working with Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker and Cab Calloway in 1950s New York City. But the magic of Derek Bailey was that all these performers felt able to play out their own obsessions – while bending their instincts towards this new, for-one-night-only situation. Bailey responds to the rhythmic math of Gaines’ dancing by drawing on his own roots in Eddie Lang and Charlie Christian, riffs scattering as they are formed. Fell and Wastell interlock like a lopsided mechanism in their duo; and the quartet pieces are a marvel, with each musician defining clear rhythmic and gestural terrain to call their own – which allows them scope aplenty for frank exchanges of view, sudden rebuttals and probing questions.