Originally released on the Dutch ICP label, this session convenes a veritable super-group of early European improv pioneers from Germany, England and the Netherlands for two spontaneous compositions, each originally occupying one side of vinyl. Recorded just two years after Brötzmann’s epochal mass blow-out Machine Gun, and only five years after Coltrane’s world-shaking Ascension, it illustrates just how rapidly the notion of group improvisation was evolving by the beginning of the 1970s. There’s still a lot of bluster and brawn, not least from Rutherford’s gusty trombone and Brötzmann’s molten tenor, so much so that Bailey’s guitar is often fighting for oxygen – raising the spectre of John Stevens’ dictum as summarised by Evan Parker: “If you can’t hear another musician, you’re playing too loud.” Yet, when things do simmer down – and particularly when Han Bennink’s more ebullient percussive gambits drop out – there’s a surprising amount of space, with ad hoc trios and duos briefly adhering: taut guitar and muttering trombone; plunging piano chords with pinging woodblocks and so on. The second piece takes things even further from the free jazz template, with an extended section of peaceful abstraction, full of overlapping tones, brassy lowing and delicate rustles. It’s an absorbing document of living music in real-time flux.