*2026 stock* One of the more obscure entries in the early Three Blind Mice catalogue, and a record that points to the label's willingness, from very near its beginning, to host visiting players alongside the domestic scene. The American saxophonist Allan Praskin worked at the international margins of the jazz circuit, and Encounter finds him in a quartet setting that draws on the rhythmic discipline of the Japanese players around him.

The writing sits firmly in the post-bop tradition: modal frames, careful heads, solos that build in arcs rather than gestures. The recording has the analogue weight TBM was already establishing as a house signature. There's not a lot of fanfare here: this is a working session by a working saxophonist, with the seriousness that implies, and that's much of its charm. A sleeper for collectors of TBM ephemera and of the wider Japanese scene's encounters with passing American players in the early seventies. Reissued in the Three Blind Mice Supreme Collection 1500.