condition (record/cover): NM / NM

Insert included. No obi.

Circle: Chick Corea, Anthony Braxton, Dave Holland and Barry Altschul, the short-lived quartet where post-Miles virtuosity and AACM structure met head-on, 1970-71 - one of the genuinely fascinating collisions in the music's history, and over almost before the sparks settled. The German concert material catches the band live, where its real character showed: standards dissolved and rebuilt from fragments, free ensemble flight with chamber-music ears, four musicians of frightening ability pushing each other past their own defaults night after night. Corea would soon turn toward the light and the charts, Braxton toward the diagrams and the decades-long system; but for one bright moment they occupied the same daring space, and the tension between their instincts is exactly what makes the music crackle.

Japanese CBS/Sony edition - Japan documented and treasured this band more than anywhere else on earth, and the Japan-only releases are the collector's core. Essential for understanding what early-seventies possibility actually felt like.