By the 1980s, New York's avant-garde jazz community was under attack. The artist-run performance spaces that had been the engine rooms of the loft scene were mostly gone, while the rise of Wynton Marsalis and the neo-bop Young Lions saw jazz make a drastic lurch backwards. For the first time in its history, the music stopped rushing forward and started to look to the past. Rather than admit defeat, many of the Big Apple's most creative musicians decided to regroup and get with the times, by taking a fresh look at where they'd come from – in much the same way that Sun Ra returned to his beloved Fletcher Henderson. Both Billy Bang and Ahmed Abdullah had previously played with Ra but, for The Group, they took their creative direction from another elder statesman: saxophonist Marion Brown. His arrangement of Mingus' ‘Goodbye Pork Pie Hat’ perfectly crystallises The Group's approach: taken at a slow, almost funereal pace that feels like a requiem for the dream of unstoppable progress, while providing space for solos that leap towards the outer limits of melodicism. This live recording captures a criminally under-documented group at a little-discussed juncture in the history of left-field jazz.