When Dizzy Gillespie’s big band went on a State Departmemt tour of Argentina in 1960, the trumpeter was so impressed when he met Lalo Schifrin in Buenos Aires that he invited him to come and join him in New York. Some months and a green card later, Lalo arrived, and within four weeks was in the studio with a big band recording the ‘Gillespiana’ suite he had written for Diz. He replaced Junior Mance in the trumpeter’s quintet and stayed for the best part of two years. This collection of their work together is slightly scattershot, although it does kick off with the entire five movements of ‘Gillespiana’. But instead of the fascinating quintet version of the work recorded 10 days later in France, we get a somewhat standard JATP jam from Stockholm (from the same European tour). We get all of the marvellous Electrifying Evening concert from MOMA in New York, which has both Dizzy and altoist Leo Wright on top form, but just one track from the 1961 Carnegie Hall concert. The mystery of that event is that the third movement of ‘Tunisian Fantasy’ by Schifrin has never been released, but here we don’t even get the first sections, just the big band bashing its way through ‘Manteca’. Then we dip in and out of the celebrated Monterey concert, and the 1961 German tour, before getting all of the French Riviera album from 1962 (much of which was actually cut in New York). So while this set offers a series of snapshots of the Gillespie/Schifrin collaboration, we only get certain pages of the full photo album, and it’s harder to hear how the relationship really developed. The 1962 New Wave album, for example is maybe the summit of Dizzy and Schifrin working on Latin material, but there’s nothing from it here. I don’t want to diss what is almost always four or even five-star music, but the compilation is not as revealing as it could be, neither showing to best effect Schifrin’s rapid development into a fine jazz pianist nor the early maturity of his composing and arranging. It’s a shame Acrobat didn’t take the more exploratory approach of some of their other sets and work this up from a 2CD set to the four or five the collaboration really deserves.