Such is the Holy Grail cachet of this album it's impossible not to see the sign ‘Rarer than hen's teeth’ on an imaginary record rack when handling the handsomely packaged CD. Steeped in mythical status due to the limited run of the original EMI/Colombia vinyl pressing, and the high esteem in which it is held by any musicians and listeners lucky enough to have heard it Hum Dono does not disappoint, and is unquestionably one of the greatest of British jazz albums, a crystallisation of the immense cultural riches of a post-colonial UK. The union of Jamaican saxophonist Harriott and Goan guitarist D'Silva is indeed very much a Made In London affair but the sensibilities are markedly different to those of the celebrated and much more available Indo-Jazz series that Harriott made with John Mayer. D'Silva was above all a superlative improviser as well as composer and stamped his personality on the music through solos as well as themes, and it is the alternation and conversation of reed and strings in an atmosphere of incense-filled hypnosis that really creates the magic here. In fact D'Silva's tone and phrasing, the rapier precision and lightness of touch vaguely recalling Gabor Szabo (especially during his time with Chico Hamilton and Charles Lloyd in the mid 1960s), and the deft, chiaroscuro lyricism of the music, perfectly enhanced by Norma Winstone's wistful wordless vocal and Ian Carr's doleful flugelhorn, convey a sense of the notes wafting into the remains of the day. For the coda of ‘Ballad For Goa’ alone, where D'Silva assumes a mandolin's grace and Winstone a flute's delicacy with heart-melting poignancy, this album is worth buying. The rub is that the whole repertoire, above all the title track, is blessed with the same beauty. If there is a feeling of fraught dusk if not charged twilight in this work then it is reinforced by actual circumstances: Harriott was only four years from his death and the sound of some of the most sensitive, understated playing of his career is almost like a final whisper before the fall of the silence of all silence.