It's a little-known fact that Tommy Flanagan played [solo] for five minutes in a Soho restaurant in 1993, and apparently it was just as unlikely that he agreed to do this solo concert the following year in a small town in Bavaria, on the back of an all-star German tour.

Certainly, he was a pre-eminent team-player and accompanist, not only for Ella but for Miles and Sonny and a host of others, and allegedly he didn't relish the pressure of playing alone.

This album appears to be roughly half of the evening's performance, and it's a leisurely amble through mostly ballads – but what ballads! Dameron's ‘If You Could See Me Now', Strayhorn's ‘Day Dream’, the Alec Wilder ‘Who Can I Turn To?’ (as opposed to the Anthony Newley one that Bill Evans recorded) and ‘Some Other Spring’, which Flanagan previously recorded with Roy Haynes. But there's also some lightly grooving stuff, sometimes after an out-of-tempo intro, such as Just Squeeze Me’, Rollins's ‘Valse Hot’ and an original blues. There is very little unaccompanied Flanagan on record, and the implication in the booklet text is that he would have vetoed this release during his lifetime. But, if you're looking for inadequacies here, you'd have to look pretty hard.