** 2025 Stock ** This compact release finds Kevin Figes & You Are Here thinking big inside small forms. Across two pieces that span the American cool-school and the visionary British avant-garde, the group uses the 7-inch format as a pressure cooker, distilling their language into sharp themes, volatile interplay and a kind of concentrated atmosphere that lingers long after the needle lifts. Rather than offering polite tributes, they inhabit the compositions, bending them just enough to reveal what still feels urgent in this material right now.

On one side, Seven for Lee nods to Lee Konitz while refusing to fossilise his legacy. The tune pivots on a limber rhythmic feel that lets alto lines skate and feint, with the band constantly adjusting the temperature underneath. Figes’ phrasing carries that Konitz-like sideways logic - a sense that the melody is thinking aloud - but the surrounding textures are leaner, more restlessly contemporary, built for small rooms and close listening. You hear the group’s identity in the details: the drummer’s clipped accents, bass figures that push rather than simply support, and harmonies that flirt with cool jazz clarity before sliding into more ambiguous, almost dreamlike colours.

Flip the record and Green and Orange Night Park plunges into a different lineage, tracing a line back to Keith Tippett’s luminous, slightly haunted vision of British jazz. Here, Kevin Figes & You Are Here stretch time, letting the piece open like late-evening light across an empty square. The arrangement leans into contrast - dark horn clusters against glinting piano or guitar, drums that pivot from murmured commentary to sudden flares. Instead of trying to match Tippett’s expansiveness, the band carves out a smaller, more intimate ritual: a nocturne where lyric motifs rise out of rougher textures, then sink back into the grain of the ensemble.

What ultimately binds the two sides is a commitment to conversation over display. Solos emerge as extensions of the writing rather than detachable showcases, and the group’s interplay feels like an argument among equals, constantly negotiating space and density. In barely a quarter of an hour, Seven for Lee / Green and Orange Night Park sketches a map of sympathies - Konitz to Tippett, New York to the British provinces, post-bop cool to free-spirit romanticism - while staking out a distinct corner for Kevin Figes & You Are Here in the current UK jazz landscape. It is the kind of small record that quietly rearranges your sense of scale, proving that two carefully chosen pieces can say as much as an overstuffed album when the band playing them knows exactly what it wants to do.