The quartet Gerry Mulligan fronted with Art Farmer from April 1958 until the late summer of 1959 was, according to drummer Dave Bailey, the ‘hottest’ he ever led. Certainly Farmer has dazzling technique, and a range of invention at all tempos that is a perfect match for Mulligan.

However, the band recorded very little in that time: half an album with Annie Ross, a Timex TV show, a brilliant set from Newport (a fragment of which is in the film Jazz on a Summer’s Day), a studio album for Columbia, a fundraising broadcast for the navy, and two concerts from the 1959 spring/summer JATP tour of Europe, of which this is one.

New Land have worked from the Swedish radio tapes of this Stockholm concert and engineer Kevin Gray has done a fine job of remastering. So, we feel almost as if we are on stage with the band as they launch into ‘As Catch Can’. Farmer’s boppish solo is a triumph and spurs Mulligan into a dazzling, agile baritone solo. The same can’t be said for his little-better-than-average piano playing on ‘I Can’t Get Started’ but fortunately he picks up the baritone sax again to join Crow and Farmer for ‘Just in Time’, which moves from a reflective introduction to urgent swing.

If proof were needed of Bailey’s view of the band’s ‘hot’ qualities, they’re all here, not least when the horns trade phrases, generating lots of audience excitement, before a fine solo from Crow. The highlight is a 12-minute version of ‘Blueport’, Art Farmer’s blues written for their 1958 Newport appearance.

However, this is not, as New Land claim, ‘previously unreleased’ material, as all this music came out on the Spanish Solar label in 2010 (In Stockholm and Hollywood 1959), which also contains a version of ‘What is There to Say?’ that’s inexplicably omitted here, as it has one of Farmer’s finest ballad solos from his time with the band. But, for a well-presented, nearly complete concert by a short-lived quartet at the peak of its powers, this is a fine album overall.