One of the great challenges for any free improvising group is balance. Given the democracy of the premise, everybody can play as they feel and hear at any time, but the real sign of the strength of the listening process, the prerequisite to the act of effective playing, is the amount of silence that group members opt for. The most impressive thing about this absorbing session is how well it ‘breathes’, due to the skill with which the musicians skip to and fro across the sound-silence border. Drummer Pandi's dry, light-handed cymbals are something of a constant presence, an endless whisper under the other three voices, but Smith, Saft and Morris withdraw for lengthy passages to change the configuration so that the quartet frequently shifts into a trio or duo, thus presenting many permutations of brass, keys and strings. Saft's ability to thicken up or thin out his keyboard voicings in line with the changing density of the sound canvas is particularly effective and his alternations of acoustic and electric piano underline this. His textures on the latter are beguiling. They seem to have been partly informed by his work as an organist and have some of the sizzle and sheen of a Hammond B3, the device Dr. Lonnie Smith called ‘the first synthesiser’. The distinctive features of an ‘avant-garde’ vocabulary – throbbing rubato; elliptical if not cryptic phrasing, sometimes dramatic alterations of mood – are discernible but they are not applied on auto pilot. There are six long pieces that encompass a wide variety of tonal colours, energy levels and ideas, and the common denominator in each case is that the musical whole is greater than the sum of the parts.