Five years in the making and representing the twenty-year story of a pioneering British jazz-rock fusion band with strong Latinesque influences… whose alumni over that period included over thirty well-known British jazz musicians… but a band you might not have heard of… or have any of their eight albums… we have finally come up with ‘Variation and Creation: The Story of PAZ’. The album was produced in cooperation with the families of Dick Crouch and Geoff Castle, the heart of the of the band over its lifetime. Its available on download, streaming and limited edition CD. 

The story behind this album… we started this project some five years ago when Ron Mathewson was alive and gave Jazz In Britain his complete archive of tape cassette recordings which included a number of PAZ sessions. We started working with Beth Curtis-Clarke (Dick Crouch’s daughter) on the album idea and she provided recordings and memorabilia from Dick’s archives and then, a couple of years ago, Caroline Castle let us have her husband Geoff’s complete archive of reel tape recordings.They included copies of PAZ albums, rough mixes of albums, unreleased albums, BBC sessions and live recordings.

All told, we had over 35 hours of PAZ recordings from which we have produced just three CD’s worth of music, ie 4 hours of music. We recruited Dr Malcolm Wilson to take on the task of selecting the tracks. His initial thought was to try to get some chronological order, but upon reflection decided that he should mix genres, rather than say, putting all the Latin tracks together, and all the sax driven rockier tracks, such as AC/DC, together. He also decided to avoiding recordings which had been released on PAZ CDs and concentrate on tunes that are not on any of those albums but either unreleased or had only featured on broadcast sessions. Although, having said that, we agreed that we should include certain ‘classic’ PAZ tunes that had been on albums, ie Bell Tree, Solar Wind and The Buddha, but made sure we chose versions that were different from the album versions. We have tried to cover all the musical styles that PAZ played and feature as many musicians as possible; it has been quite a challenge but we hope you will agree we’ve ended up with something pretty good, and which represents… ‘The Story of PAZ'.