Last year's John Stevens day at the South Bank during the EFG London Jazz Festival barely scratched the surface of the range of Stevens' musical achievements in almost 10 hours of performances. One aspect that was definitely missing, although some of the musicians involved were present, was his foray into fusion with his band Away. As both Richard Williams in the original liner notes and Charles Waring in a cogent new essay observe, this was probably the most readily accessible of Stevens' bands to the general public. Certainly, at the time, the original Away album (recorded by a line-up virtually identical to Trevor Watts' Amalgam) was the beneficiary of a marketing campaign from Vertigo, the likes of which no other Stevens ensemble ever received before or after, with distinctive typography and Stevens poured into a natty three-piece suit. The opening ‘It Will Never Be The Same’ has a lot in common with the Elton Dean era of Soft Machine, with sparkling interplay between Trevor Watts' alto and Stevens' drums, while the following ‘Tumble’ has more in common with the scratchy, randomised sounds of an SME gig. It was a band that made waves at the time, having been recorded in what seemed then to be the rather exotic location of Berlin, but like many a Stevens project it did not last, and by the following year he was the only survivor in the lineup. Following a couple of singles with guest John Martyn (in whose band Stevens had toured) which are included here, the new Away made the next album (prophetically called Somewhere In Between) from which the drum-centric ‘Chick Boom’ is the highlight, containing a magisterial final solo from Stevens that has his colleagues cheering with enthusiasm. The final album Mazin Ennit starts with a readily accessible slightly Caribbeanthemed groove on ‘Away’ and follows this with a number of shortish and quite approachable tracks, although with Stevens' customary dollops of freedom laced into the mix. But sales were modest, the writing was on the wall and Phonogram dropped the band from its Vertigo imprint. It wasn't the end for Away, but thereafter it was more marginal and less mainstream than during this brief flurry of activity in the mid-1970s. BGO are to be commended for bringing the material out on CD for the first time. It is of its time, and now sounds rather dated, but it's a vital element in the Stevens canon, and in the development of a distinctive British take on jazz-rock fusion.