With hindsight, not all of Leonard Feather's pronouncements have stood the test of time. However, when he wrote on the original 1959 liner notes to this album that: “here you will find the type of music that will never depend on fashion, or technical display or a caustic rejection of society – here is experience, here is wisdom, here is beauty, here at its purest and truest is jazz”, he had a point. This octet of mainstreamers is playing a music that might be dismissed by some as ‘simple’; or ‘old hat’, but is actually astonishingly difficult to do well and with conviction. Yet Webster and company make it sound completely effortless. The guile and skill of the band is in the way that difficulties are sidestepped and smoothed over. Even so, in the 20-minute opening ‘In a Mellow Tone’ we are occasionally brought up short, by Spann's plangent guitar, for example, which offers nothing like the minimal swing of Freddie Green or the driving perfection of Barney Kessel in similar settings, but with a metallic blues-inflected originality that chimes perfectly with the inventive (and relatively unfamiliar) sound of Budd Johnson's tenor solo. Jo Jones plays a reduced kit – brushes on the snare and a hi-hat for the most part – but swings mightily, and the band creates the perfect backdrop for some of Webster's own most passionate soloing. Webster's quartet version of ‘Time After Time’ is a paradigm of his breathy ballad style and four minutes of perfection, but what makes this such a fine album overall is the way he is supported and – in the most gentlemanly way – challenged by his fellow players. The time is made up with a couple of JATP jams featuring Ben, but the original album on its own is such a thing of beauty it really needs no further adornment.