The title lays it out: Five musicians looped and shimmered in an unplanned environment of a NYC Lower East Side apartment session. No audience but themselves; no leader, no tunes, no objective but the engine of their own ideas fusing immediacy, pace and momentum. Perfectly balanced in the alloy are listening and flowing with the sounds. Here’s the raw edge of now, tempered by the etiquette of cooperative improvisation.

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Troubadour Robinson was the veteran in this company, a recording artist twice over; all the others were close to the dawn of their careers.

 

Both trumpeters were poised “lead” players who had just made their mark in the avant-garde: Warren Gale, who had just recorded with drummer Jim Zitro, was destined for Stan Kenton’s Orchestra and a Bebop future; Parisian Coursil, who worked stateside with Sunny Murray and Bill Dixon, spent decades in academia before returning to music in his last years.

 

Twenty-year-old Tintweiss had already recorded with Patty Waters, Burton Greene and Frank Wright (alongside Coursil) for the ESP-Disk free jazz label. Laurence Cook still surges on as he did for years with Bill Dixon, Paul Bley, Bobby Naughton, the Purple Why and others.