Alexander von Schlippenbach, Eddie Prévost

Blackheath is the first recorded meeting of pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach and drummer Eddie Prévost. Both had been active in German and English free music since the mid-1960s, yet, as Bill Meyer noted, they had never played together before March 2008. The concert falls into three long parts, a piano solo, a drum solo and a duet, each lasting between twenty and twenty-six minutes.

It was recorded at Blackheath Halls in London on 30 March 2008, at the end of a five-city English tour. In his notes Christoph Wagner points out that both men loved Art Blakey before turning to free playing. Meyer adds that they share more than their roles in AMM and the Globe Unity Orchestra would suggest. Schlippenbach's Four Pieces as One draws on his own Twelve Tone and The Forge, on Bernd Alois Zimmermann's Allegro Agitato and on Eric Dolphy's Out There. Prévost's Blackheath Breakdown starts with brushes on drumheads, moves to sticks on toms and closes mostly on cymbals. In the duet Skipping with Monk the theme of Thelonious Monk's Skippy turns up fragmented and upended. Its cascading melody seems to spiral upwards each time it returns. Brian Olewnick, no great admirer of the pianist, heard the solo set as close to Cecil Taylor in its melodic content. He traced Prévost's habit of staying in one area of the kit for minutes at a time back to AMM. Of the drum solo he wrote that he had never heard "a finer, more perfectly balanced, more inventive drum solo in the jazz tradition".

Issued by Matchless Recordings as MRCD 73 on CD in 2008, with notes by Christoph Wagner.