Marion Brown

Featuring: Barre Phillips, Gunter Hampel

condition (record/cover): NM ("seemingly all copies of this unofficial release have a severe pressing fault on the first thirty seconds of track A1") / VG+ (minimal damage near pocket)

Marion Brown's Paris-period film music, from the fertile European seasons that followed his New York apprenticeship in the Coltrane and ESP circles - the years when the gentlest radical of the new thing found in France the space and respect that home rationed. The late-sixties exile suited Brown perfectly: his alto, one of the most personal sounds of the whole avant-garde, lyrical even at its freest, moves here through cinematic moods, chamber textures and open improvisation with the searching quality that marks everything he touched. Film work gave the era's improvisers a peculiar freedom - music in service of images could wander where club sets could not - and the soundtrack corner of the sixties avant-garde remains a rich and undervisited territory as a result.

This is one of its genuine treasures, long sought by those who know, rare on vinyl in any edition and slow to surface. A jewel for the Marion Brown shelf, and for the soundtrack shelf beside it.