Innovative thinking aside, Ornette made game-changing music because of the brilliance of the pool of collaborators into which he dipped throughout his career. Variations on both the instrumentation and personnel of the small groups he led throughout the 1950s and 60s consistently produced memorable results and this quartet with its twin engine of double basses rates highly on the thrill scale at these 1968 concerts in Rome and Milan. In Haden and Izenzon there are two players with sufficient contrast in tone and attack to give the music an intriguing sense of push and pull, as they vary their blend of arco and fretted lines and quarter and eighth notes with unforced fluidity. However it is the way that Ed Blackwell matches them for orchestral richness through his percussive swell on the drums, alternately super funky and teasingly abstract, that makes the performance a brilliant display of freedom within form and form in freedom, providing Ornette with ground that is both as solid and mobile as his vision required. The leader in any case improvises magnificently throughout, particularly on an outstandingly languorous ‘Lonely Woman’ and a truly joyful ‘Tutti’.