That ethic is at the core of In Concerts. The music was never discussed beforehand; there were no pre‑agreed cues, no hand signals. Each performance begins with a collective leap into the unknown, and what follows is a single, evolving conversation in which roles are continually renegotiated. Tippett’s piano can be storm‑like or pointillist, hurling clusters one moment and tracing filigree detail the next. Dunmall’s tenor and soprano move between keening, Ayler‑ish cries and sinuous, folk‑tinged lines. Rogers’ bass is both engine and commentary, using extended techniques and huge, resonant tone to open new fault lines in the music. Levin’s drums centre everything, alternating between volcanic barrages and a kind of hovering, textural time that lets the others stretch and contract at will. Even at their most turbulent, there is a deep sense of listening underpinning every gesture.

The three concerts show how that trust aged and deepened. The 1993 Cheltenham set crackles with a certain youthful ferocity: ideas tumble over one another, the quartet testing how far and fast they can push without fracture. By Vienna in 2003, the music breathes differently; long spans of tension and release emerge, the group unafraid of silence or apparent stasis, knowing they can summon momentum when the moment is right. The 2010 Birmingham performance, made barely a year before Levin’s passing, carries the weight and tenderness of shared history. Peaks are no less intense, but the route to them is more oblique, as if the band were drawing on a private cartography of gestures, sounds and risks accumulated over two decades.

For Paul Dunmall, Mujician was “one of the greatest free improvising jazz groups in the history of this music,” and In Concerts is offered in that spirit: not as a tidy retrospective, but as evidence. There are imperfections, of course - rough edges, cul‑de‑sacs, moments where the search is audible. Yet those are part of the point. When it clicked, as Dunmall recalls, the music reached “astonishing heights, almost out‑of‑body feelings,” a sense of the spiritual that had nothing to do with genre labels and everything to do with four people committing, without safety net, to the shape of the next sound. These recordings capture that commitment in real time, preserving some of the best music they ever made together and offering a vivid reminder of what collective improvisation can be when trust, risk and devotion to the moment are allowed to lead.