A couple of hours in Steve Khan’s company is always an honour, but these three tight, almost intimate recordings are particularly pleasurable. With the late 1970s fusion bubble bursting Khan lined up with musicians whose associations were impeccable, but instead of going for a stellar rocking sound, the band produced Eyewitness, an intimate, knotty and, thanks largely to Badrena’s percussion, often quirkily-voiced set of songs that were fresh and rhythmically irresistible. And to prove it was no studio concoction, Modern Times (originally known in the US as Blades) is a live collection with Jackson and Jordan in particular enjoying the kind of shared fluency that comes only with the most special of rhythm sections. The album is essentially four long, but never bloated, group improvs, which were severely truncated to fit the then constrictions of vinyl. With Casa Loco – a gloriously grammatically incorrect reference to Jordan’s loft where much of the music grew out of jams – you feel you’ve fallen into a Police album, with Jordan picking up on Copeland’s punk-reggae feel and Badrena re-cycling a Sting-like vox. And bizarrely it works as it grows and swells around a multitude of latin and rock-fuelled themes that we’re lucky to be eye and ear witnesses to all these decades later.