Saxophonist Tim Berne released his first Snakeoil album on the ECM label in 2012; the band's fifth The Fantastic Mrs. 10, got a four-star John Fordham review in Jazzwise (May 2020). This exhilarating, retrospective live double CD documents the band grappling with Berne's sign-posted, free-form aesthetic and consistently hitting emotional highs.

CD One, recorded at New Haven's intimate Firehouse 12 performance/studio space in 2017, captures the quartet in mature full flight. Berne's confident and abrasive alto sax is the perfect vehicle for the looped, step-toned themes which are the band's signature device. On ‘Moornoats’, the album's second track, one such is there from the start. But it emerges mid-point on ‘Seven’, after a feature for drums, and on the opener, it is a ghost played at the end, emerging as if magicked by the band's collective will.

The second CD presents one excerpt from the quartet's second gig in 2009 and three from their third, the following year. Here themes and moods are clearly stated from the outset, but the free-wheeling invention and collective spirit are already in place. Pianist Matt Mitchell's two-handed virtuosity twins expressionist rumble with pre-set lines and percussionist Ches Smith's lean beats, fierce accuracy and control of sound sustain a multitude of moods. Oscar Noriega, on clarinets, a schooled contrast to Berne's raucous energy, provides balance. The album opens with atonal lines and fractured beats, continues in a melancholy mood and delivers ‘Scanners’, a classic Berne theme. The closer ‘Hemphill’, from the band's second-ever gig, sashays, fades and swaggers for 21 minutes and, guided from within, grips throughout. Nearly a decade on, that fine-tuned inner spirit remained undimmed.