Two significant and, more importantly, outrageously enjoyable releases from three parties whose relationship goes back four decades. The only wonder is that this is the first time Frisell can be heard live with the big band, seamlessly weaving with Gibbs' arrangements. Every song bar Gil Evans' ‘Las Vegas Tango’ is out of Frisell's playlist, but Gibbs sometimes cheekily, sometimes darkly, re-pitches them in new contexts. ‘Benny's Bugle’ is a good time boogie, while ‘Freddy's Step’ rips and roars with the broadest of grins with Ballard in particularly sparky mood. Gibbs' ability to arrange in precise detail yet create great plains of space sets Frisell off dramatically on a sumptuous ‘You've Got To Hide Your Love Away’, but it's ‘On The Lookout/Faraway’ with its surging sea drifts of brass rising and falling against Frisell's meditative voicings that we know we are in the midst of something unique, something most special indeed. No Frisell on In My View, but we get serious slabs of new material, or at least unrecorded material like ‘Spanish Sketch’, a nod to Gil Evans, but which is party-going Gibbs all the way through. There are covers of course: an ecstatic ‘Ramblin” is a joyful tribute to Ornette (replete with a hefty Ian Dury quote), but it's the ability to keep shape even as the musical boundaries seem to ease and slip away which astonishes, as in the endlessly turning world of ‘As A Matter of Fact’ or the sighful ‘Ida Lupino’. Gibbs and the NDR know each other so well they predict the dance of each other's subtle steps, no more so than on Monk's ‘Misterioso’ which chimes and sings with a narcotic sway that would have the great man himself up and dancing one of his little dances. This is big music, studded with bejewelled detail. Please let there be so much more to come.