Why break a butterfly on a wheel or try to analyse the fragile beauties of these extraordinary recordings? If ever a drummer embraced free time, it's Motian, with his gift for dissolving bar lines even as he stayed true to an unstated pulse. The core of this band had already played together for a decade when Winter & Winter got them on board, so that jazz cliché about telepathy is for real as these guys play their hearts out: and these guys really play in the best child-like sense, without ego or competition or self consciousness: they just mainline those oh so familiar melodies and go for it. At times the breathy fragile hush of these tracks culled from five albums is too gossamer light to bear, as on the closing curlicues of ‘It Should've Happened A Long Time Ago’. Which is why Konitz's salty presence is welcome on the rolling sea dog gait of ‘How Deep Is The Ocean’, or the sudden earnestness of ‘Just One of Those Things’. A welcome compilation to send you back to the gorgeous originals, the sadness is that Motian and Haden are no longer with us.