‘With Touch, the Tortoise bandmembers — Jeff Parker, Dan Bitney, Douglas McCombs, John Herndon, and John McEntire — harness their collectivist songwriting approach, a slightly anarchistic but resolutely egalitarian process where ideas triumph over ego towards an abstracted muscularity. While there are still excursions into the dusky, elegantly gnarled jazz ambience that flourished on landmark works like Millions Now Living Will Never Die and TNT, Touch is perhaps most remarkable for Tortoise’s unapologetic embrace of grand gesture. Aerodynamically re-engineered Krautrock, hand-cranked techno rave-ups, and pointillist spaghetti western fanfares are all imbued with Tortoise’s now-signature internal logic — equally alluring and confounding, a puzzle to be savored rather than solved.’

Duets by trumpet, or French horn, and guitar.

With Kenny Baker, Ronnie Scott, Tubby Hayes, Jeff Clyne.

Spiritual jazz vocal in the great tradition of Leon Thomas, Joe Lee Wilson and Andy Bey, with excellent versions of I’ve Known Rivers and Ooh Child, and several terrific modal numbers; fine backing. Recommended.

‘The ghosts of Armstrong and Handy smile down as Trovesi’s octet roars through a programme that cross-references the spirit of New Orleans with Italian popular song and European classical music.’

Top-notch quartet-jazz, feeling and brainy. MT evokes Trane — though no chordal instrument here — and Shorter (to Avishai Cohen’s Miles). There are tributes to Stevie — ‘master of the blues’ — and Ursula Le Guin. ‘It needs to be personal, meaningful, otherwise the blues can be banal. I believe it to be sacred, like a spiritual discipline.’

Still sealed.

Reaching solo-piano explorations in blues, jazz and classical music by the Free Jazz pioneer, in 1970; inspired by the revolutionary spirit of the times, and — opening with a dedication to Don Cherry — the New Thing.

A second set of piano improvisations, one year after the first, now more extended, percussive, insistent, and tumultuous; explicitly enraged by the recent murder of George Jackson by a San Quentin guard, and the massacre at Attica Prison.

‘There are relatively few places where members of the two great Arkestras — Ra’s and Tapscott’s — cross paths… As you might expect from such a line-up, Voyage From Jericho does not have a wasted note. Every light is most definitely on, the band are running hot, and the spirits are live in the set. Tyler’s compositions are ruggedly carved, heraldic and open; he leads on baritone, sculpting the songs, growling out blue-flamed multi-phonics, the flow in full spate. Boykins steps lightly with his familiar elasticity and glowing presence; Blythe and Cross duck and weave, and Reid clatters and baffles, following and leading, echoing and supporting, always right there in his sui genesis super-precision time-beyond-time. Top-tier fire music.’ (Francis Gooding, The Wire)