Trombonist Roswell Rudd worked with Herbie Nichols in the early 1960s, shortly before the pianist's untimely death at the age of 44 in 1963. It must have had a powerful effect on Rudd: by the 1980s he was one of very few musicians performing Nichols' compositions, at a time when Nichols had become a largely forgotten figure in jazz. For this 1982 session – which tackles three pieces by Nichols and three by Thelonious Monk – Rudd assembled a transatlantic crew with deep connections to the music, and to each other. Rudd was a long-time associate of Steve Lacy, who had played with Monk in 1960 and recorded several albums of the pianist's music. American bassist Kent Carter had played with Lacy for years, meanwhile Dutchmen Mengelberg and Bennink had both deeply internalised the music of Monk as far back as the early 1960s and both, crucially, had rare knowledge of Nichols. Of course, the other factor that bound this fortuitous crew was that all of them were active practitioners of the avant-garde stretching right back to its ‘new thing’ heyday in the US and the birth of European free music on the other side of the pond. As you might expect, then, all the performances here are infused with equal measures of reverence and puckish wit. Nichols' ‘Twelve Bars’ is a humorous drunken stumble with exaggerated trombone lurches, while his ‘Blue Chopsticks’ starts with a bastardised tangent on the famous kindergarten exercise before leaping into joyous swing with Mengelberg throwing in both blocky, Monkish shapes and avant-garde splashes. The Monk tunes are negotiated with equal daring and aplomb, wringing ‘Epistrophy’ through a Bossa-ish opening that pans out into breezy yet serious bop. As Rudd adroitly suggests in his liner notes, the result is “something very old and very new at the same time”.