According to Robin D.G. Kelley's authoritative tome Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, Mike Osborne played only on a couple of occasions with alto saxophonist Jackie McLean, encounters never documented on tape, which is a shame. For the curious, a means of imagining what that may have sounded like is this reissue of an April 1972 concert between two lodestones of British jazz: alto saxophonist Mike Osborne and pianist Stan Tracey but only in the most abstract sense. While Osborne revered McLean and Tracey cited Monk as an influence, all four men are quite unique and there is a universe apart from '50s New York and the London suburb of Stockwell in the '70s. Yet a commonality of exploration exists even if the delivery is starkly different.

Even to those with more than a passing familiarity of the indigenous strains of British jazz, this pairing is unusual. Tracey, born in London in 1926, has been active since the mid '50s, accompanied numerous Americans as part of the house band at Ronnie Scott's and was probably best known at the time of this recording for his Jazz Suite Inspired by Dylan Thomas' "Under Milk Wood". Osborne, on the other hand, was born in 1941 in Hereford near the Welsh border and came up in the circle around Mike Westbrook and then later peer John Surman. But there were analogues, both within Britain, with Kenny Wheeler the previously straight-ahead elder joining the Spontaneous Music Ensemble, and in Europe, most notably Albert Mangelsdorff throwing in with Peter Brötzmann. And it should be stated that rock and roll's burgeoning presence made Tracey's generation anachronistic and it was the efforts of younger players like Osborne, as well as Tracey's wife Jackie, that kept him working as a musician instead of for the Royal Mail.

Original is their first document together and compelling enough for the two that more duets would happen in 1974 and 1976, both also released (Alone & Together With Mike Osborne - Live At Wigmore Hall, 1974, Cadillac and Tandem, Ogun, respectively), not mentioning any work alongside each other in other groups they may have had as well (at least one, Tracey in an early version of Harry Miller's Isipingo, is available).

The music is the spontaneously composed title track, originally split across two LP sides and totaling a little over 45 minutes. The term "spontaneously composed" rather than improvised is used with intention; Tracey was first and foremost a composer and Osborne had the technical facility and mix of traditional grounding and experimentalism to plaster over the structures that Tracey would build but also to punch right through them occasionally.

What is most surprising is a complete lack of hesitation, perhaps born of the setting, where if it didn't work it didn't work, but more likely mutual respect in what was already a cooperative multi-generational environment. Tracey is masterful in his delineation of borders and drives the dynamics of the proceedings. Osborne plays with almost terrifying tartness and boundless invention and there are times when the mental-illness-driven hallucinations that would take him off the scene in less than a decade seem to be happening on stage with some of his exhortations.