Tom Chant, John Edwards, Eddie Prévost

The Virtue in If is a studio session by the Eddie Prévost Trio, the jazz-rooted group the AMM co-founder has kept at the drum kit alongside his work in free improvisation. With Tom Chant on soprano saxophone and John Edwards on double bass, the trio plays open improvisation, and the titles circle around uncertainty: Contingent Upon, Maybe Years, Mayhaps, Perchance.

The three recorded at Gateway Studios, Kingston-upon-Thames, on 28 August 2000, with Steve Lowe engineering. Chant, born in Dublin in 1975, had been playing with Prévost and Edwards since 1997, and Edwards is a bassist with an unusually wide range of techniques. Six pieces run to well over an hour, the longest being the 22-minute Whatever Worlds. In his own description Prévost writes that the trio "quite intuitively... works in a subtle, attentive way", examining where the music is going while it is being played, each player aware of the other creative beings in the room. The same trio returned later on Matchless with All Change.

Released by Matchless Recordings as MRCD 43, on CD, with notes by Prévost and a front cover by Carol Finer.