If the previous Tubby Hayes appearance on Gearbox Records – The Jazz Couriers, Live in Morecambe 1959: Tippin' (GB 1510) – lacked a little in sound quality, it was a nevertheless very welcome – essential even – addition to Hayes' discography, a ‘sound photograph’ of the band at work one night in Lancashire on material that had not hitherto been released elsewhere. This latest gem is equally essential, and the sound quality is much better, except for a little minor distortion from time to time, which is a small price to pay for Hayes in top form. Well produced, this lavish 180-gram vinyl will surely become a collector's item. Interestingly, the drummer is Tony Oxley and even though the examples of him playing straight-ahead are few and far between (his contribution to Ronnie Scott … The Band: Live at Ronnie's springs to mind but not many more), he really had a perfect sense of time and swing (the two do not necessarily go together) and it is a shame he did not figure more often with Hayes. He is not loud, yet he has an inspirational rhythmic impetus that seems to lift Hayes. This album was recorded in May 1972, almost a year after the heart operation that was supposed to have left Hayes a shadow of his former self. Yet of the three tracks here, his flute feature on ‘Someday My Prince Will Come’ and his adventurous tenor saxophone playing on ‘Seven Steps to Heaven’ and ‘Alone Together’ (the latter at 14’ 23” which comprises side two of the album) you would be hard pressed to claim his heart operation had impeded his playing. Hayes always possessed elegance and poise, and these characteristics, together with a seemingly endless flow of ideas, inversions, paraphrases and melodic ingenuity, combine to make this album an important addition to the slowly growing (often thanks to Gearbox Records) corpus of Hayes recordings.