No greater sign of Steve Lacy's significance to the jazz aesthetic can be found than in the contrast between this sumptuous 9-CD box set and the recent reissues such as Avignon and After. That was a solo performance and this is small to large-ish groups, but the common denominator is the soprano sax virtuoso's unstinting imagination in the two formats. The first album of the collection, 1976's quartet set Trickles, is something of a foundation on which Lacy would build in the two decades that followed. All of the inventive tightrope walking between swing and free playing gained an array of new colours that culminated in the rich palette of the 1993 octet in which the longstanding Lacy-Steve Potts reed section was augmented by Ricky Ford's tenor saxophone and Tom Varner's French horn. In between those two albums there were several other highlights, above all the thrilling Dutch Masters quintet that featured stellar American George Lewis. Insofar as he was relentlessly in search of newness and anything but scared of the war on orthodoxy Lacy has to go down in history as a jazz super major.