Who? Well, Jazzwise readers of a certain age may remember drummer Fat John Cox as a stalwart of the early 1960s ‘mainstream’ scene in London, a movement that made the Six Bells in Chelsea the pre-boppers equivalent of The Little Theatre or Gerrard Street Ronnie's. This version of Cox's band is heard on the earlier ex-Decca material included as a bonus at the end of disc two. However, the band featured on the previously unissued studio recordings that comprise the majority of this collection marked the point when Cox jumped over the fence into modernism, forging a bunch of promising new faces – Ray Warleigh, Chris Pyne, Pete Lemer and Danny Thompson, among them – in a unit that, even today, seems unclassifiable. While most of the repertoire ties in with then-current jazz fashion (Mingus, Silver, Golson, Mance), its players are already outward bound. Hear Warleigh's Dolphy-meets-Cannonball alto, or the surly post-Knepper slidings of Pyne. As with several other recent Turtle releases, this is a vivid snapshot of a corner of 1960s British jazz that might otherwise have gone unnoticed. It also gives new listeners a chance to hear how musicians who later became renowned for quite different stylistic endeavours (Thompson and Lemer, especially) worked out their own singular identities as young hard-boppers. As ever with Turtle, the production values are first-rate and – I have to declare an interest here as author of the album's notes – the booklet affords enough space to give the full background to what is a fascinating rediscovery.

Not a world-beating album, but a truly engaging signpost of British jazz development après-Tubbs and co. Oh, and it is Cox's (posthumous) album debut, too. Shame he isn't around to see it.