On the original liner notes for this album, annotator Nat Hentoff writes that with the musicians that comprise The Esoteric Circle – Garbarek, Rypdal, Andersen and Christensen – “Norway can no longer be considered a backwater of the new jazz”. Prophetic words indeed, and while the musicians themselves would not claim they were the finished article at the time of this recording (1969) this is a band that rather than coming out of the cool, comes out of the hot. This was a time when Garbarek's original influences, Dexter Gordon and John Coltrane were being pushed aside by the ‘New Thing’ experimenters, most notably Albert Ayler and Pharoah Sanders. If you ever want to catch someone out on a blindfold test, play them ‘Traneflight’, a Garbarek feature that is both raw and aggressive and most unlike the Garbarek we know today. Rydal approaches the jazz equation from a rock perspective and his playing on ‘Rabalder’ – in tandem with Christensen's fiery drumming – suggests their lines of input might be traced to John McLaughlin and Tony Williams. Yet if we were to look at how jazz evolved ‘away from home’, to use Chris Goddard's apposite phrase, then we would see it progress through accommodation, assimilation and emulation. Some musicians, of course, sought to go beyond emulation, seeking to create original music that was both part of a universal language of jazz and a singular expression of who they were in the world. To some extent this was becoming apparent on numbers such as the title track and ‘Karin's Mode’, but would evolve in a remarkably short space of time when in September 1970, the same group would record the album Afric Pepperbird that opened a new chapter in Scandinavian jazz – but that's another story.