French tenor saxophone player Barney Wilen is now probably best remembered for his work with Miles Davis on the soundtrack to Louis Malle’s 1958 film Ascenseur Pour l’Échafaud (Lift To The Scaffold). Less well-known is his Zodiac, Wilen’s cosmic excursion into free jazz that was intended to accompany a surrealistic animated film by his friend Jean Larivière. Although the film was never completed, Wilen’s music was eventually released in 1966 on the French Disques Vogue label. Wilen is joined by Larivière’s musician friends – bass player Jean-Francois Jenny Clarke and drummer Jacques Thalot, together with German vibrapone and piano player Carl Heinz Berger, who would later record for the esoteric US label ESP-Disk.

In many ways Berger’s presence on the record is the guiding force that drives the record in a different direction from the jazz route Wilen would have been more familiar with. His echoing vibraphone gives a strange, alluring detail to the playing, an addition that (especially on ‘Balance’ where he is let loose) introduces a sense of disjointed freedom.

For his part Wilen rises to the free jazz challenge with power and passion – while, at the same time, never totally abandoning his modern jazz songbook. Zodiac still holds up as an important artefact of 1960s French jazz, but mostly it is Berger’s musical star that is in the ascendant here.