And the birds sang… is less a historical release than a set of messages finally delivered. On one side of its time divide, we find Larry Stabbins and Keith Tippett in 1983 at Maida Vale Studios, folding decades of shared language into three improvisations that treat tenor and soprano saxophone, piano, small percussion and voice as parts of a single, agitated organism. On the other, we are dropped into the charged intimacy of The Klinker Club in 2000, where Stabbins and Louis Moholo‑Moholo re‑ignite a partnership forged in the crucible of the South African diaspora and the London free‑music underground. Jazz In Britain gathers these materials under a title that nods to fragility and to song, but also to the sudden, disruptive cries that improvisation can let loose in the air.

The Maida Vale recordings with Tippett show both players at full stretch. The first and third duets open like slow questions, Stabbins’s lines edging from breathy lyricism into more fractured speech while Tippett answers with clusters, inside‑piano rattles and percussive detonations that make the instrument sound at once orchestral and subterranean. The “full‑blown assaults on the senses” are entirely earned: when the music surges, it does so as the culmination of a build‑up in texture, overtones and emotional pressure, not as any kind of pre‑planned climax. Yet threaded among these eruptions are passages of startling delicacy - small, crystalline figures, stray melodic cells that seem to remember song.

At the centre of this studio triptych sits an unexpectedly naked moment: a duet reading of Cole Porter’s Every Time We Say Goodbye. Tippett never treated standards as relics, and here he lays the harmony out with an almost hymn‑like clarity, allowing Stabbins to lean into the tune’s bittersweet arc without irony. You can hear the free‑improv vocabulary hovering at the edges - bent notes, elastic time, the occasional harmonic side‑step - but the core of the song is left intact. It plays like a coded love letter to the jazz tradition they were constantly deconstructing elsewhere, a reminder that, for both musicians, abstraction and song were two sides of the same coin.