Various

Featuring: Eddie Prévost

A Company of Others is the first of four CDs from Making a Journey to a Bright Nowhere. Cafe OTO offered Eddie Prévost the residency for his 80th birthday, one concert every Saturday in July 2022, and he dedicated it to the late promoter Victor Schonfield, once AMM's part-time manager. The opening night, 9 July, took its subtitle from an earlier Prévost project, Meetings with Remarkable Saxophonists. Six saxophonists played in shifting combinations over a house band, with Prévost on a conventional drum kit instead of his usual percussion set-up. It is the loudest and most openly jazz-rooted of the four volumes.

The horns were altos Jason Yarde and Seymour Wright, tenors Harrison Smith, Sue Lynch and Tom Chant, and baritone Alan Wilkinson; two more tenors could not come. Pianist Veryan Weston, bassist Marcio Mattos and guitarist N. O. Moore completed the rhythm section. David Grundy, who was there, compared the set-up to a free jazz version of a sixties house band, with Moore's squalls of feedback and Prévost splashing out polyrhythms. In the 32-minute First Set the saxophonists enter one by one, relay style, before the full band takes over. Two trios follow without the rhythm section. Lynch, Smith and Yarde move between counterpoint and near unison. Chant, Wright and Wilkinson then deliver what Stuart Broomer called the most astonishing collection of saxophonic squeals, grunts and other sonic abrasions (The Free Jazz Collective, 2023). After a brief birthday tune the closing Fifth Piece turns to something like a lament. Grundy found the night Infectious, joyous, and delightfully unsubtle (2022).

Released by Matchless Recordings in 2023 on CD (MRCD 109), recorded at Cafe OTO, London, on 9 July 2022, with notes by Prévost.