Two months after their appearance at Hamburg’s Onkel Pö’s nightclub, this same line-up taped Ichi Ban for the Dutch Timeless label, one of the best straightahead acoustic albums of the 1970s. If anything, this session tops its studio-taped encore and then some, not least because it affords truly generous helpings of co-leader Cook, a musician all-too-frequently dismissed as dependable and workmanlike by jazz scribes, but here is positively burning! To say that he overshadows even a blisteringly on-form Woody Shaw is a serious understatement. On track after track, Cook is undoubtedly the main attraction, revealing in full the style he’d forged out of elements of Mobley-esque hard bop and the language of middle-period Coltrane. For a time in the late 1960s, he and his Horace Silver successor Joe Henderson seemed to be getting ever closer in delivery, and while there remain certain similarities – they share a love of a blunt, barking tone when things get hot – the elder man clearly possessed his own line in musical narrative. Two ballads (‘When Sunny Gets Blue’ and Monk’s ‘Pannonica’) are quite literally wrung of every possibility but the high-spot is a treatment of Henry Mancini’s ‘Moment To Moment’, which is cleverly recast in the colours of Crescent-era Coltrane. Cook’s compadres are in equally devastating form, with co-leader Hayes kicking at the up-tempo material furiously. Unsurprisingly, Shaw’s best moments come on his own post-bop classic, ‘The Moontrane’. There’s no doubting whose record this really is, though. If you don’t know Cook’s work, or if you’ve only heard the Silver sessions, this will be a saxophonic wake-up call. Very recommended!