Jennifer Allum, John Butcher, Ute Kanngiesser, Eddie Prévost

Sounds of Assembly documents the second meeting of a quartet built around Eddie Prévost and the weekly improvisation workshop he has led in Southwark since 1999. The session was arranged for Stewart Morgan's film portrait Eddie Prévost's Blood and took place in the assembly hall of Addey and Stanhope School in Deptford, where Prévost had enrolled in the mid-1950s. Eight years later the Japanese label Meenna issued the music, far more of it than the film could use.

Jennifer Allum plays violin, John Butcher tenor and soprano saxophones, Ute Kanngiesser cello and Prévost percussion; Giovanni La Rovere recorded them on the afternoon of 29 April 2013. Allum and Kanngiesser met each other and Prévost as regulars at the workshop, and Butcher has played with him both inside and outside AMM. Butcher went to senior school a few miles up the Thames in Bermondsey, the neighbourhood of Prévost's childhood home. The five titles come from the Thames-side descriptions in Joyce Cary's novel The Horse's Mouth. Writing in Dusted in 2021, Bill Meyer heard a "ritualistic atmosphere" in which each sound, however brief or quiet, carries weight. He noted moments when saxophone and percussion are much louder than the unamplified strings, while the pluck of string and the knock of wood keep their charge. In The Free Jazz Collective in 2022, Ron Coulter called it "a rare must hear album".

Released by Meenna in April 2021 as meenna-964, a CD in a limited edition of 300, mixed and mastered by Butcher, with artwork and design by Cathy Fishman.