This is the Charles Lloyd Quartet hitting the peak of its powers during its brief lifetime that had begun on record with Dream Weaver, recorded on 29 March 1966, and would end with its implosion in late 1968. It was recorded during their summer 1967 tour of Europe that had produced Live in the Soviet Union the previous month and though the Montreux set shares two titles with it, ‘Sweet Georgia Bright’ and ‘Love Song to a Baby’, the extent to which the quartet had begun to make use of the kind of dissonance and abstraction associated with free jazz comes as something of a revelation. After Lloyd first made his breakthrough with the best selling Forest Flower: At Monterey from September 1966, he hit the headlines as, “The first psychedelic jazz musician” by playing rock venues, most famously the Fillmore where Love In and Journey Within were recorded in January 1967. Here attention was centred around the band's use of rock rhythms on some songs, a significant harbinger of the times from one of the then most popular bands in jazz. Granted, on Love In, the band acknowledged abstraction on numbers such as ‘Is It Really the Same?’, but on Montreux the freedom principal becomes more central to their performances. On ‘Sweet Georgia Bright’ that freedom remains largely within the ABAC form of ‘Sweet Georgia Brown’ on which it is based, even though both Lloyd and Jarrett seem to venture far and wide. All but one of the songs on this immaculately produced 2CD set, recorded at the very first Montreux Jazz Festival, are Lloyd originals and have previously appeared on earlier Lloyd albums, while ‘Days and Nights Waiting’ is by Jarrett. The high spot is the 27-minute ‘Forest Flower’, which had also appeared on Forest Flower: At Monterey, and helped put the Lloyd group on the map. This is a far more dangerous version, and, as on the earlier version, Jarrett's playing is exemplary. Each CD covers one of the two sets the quartet played at Montreux, and the sound quality is studio standard. Not only does this release provide an absorbing glimpse of the Lloyd quartet at a creative highpoint, it presents a fuller picture of this band when seen in context of their previous eight Atlantic albums. It is doubtful whether the original Atlantic years tapes survived, so the likelihood of previously unissued material emerging from that source is remote, making Montreux a very valuable addition to the Lloyd discography.