I'm reminded once more of those pages in John Berger's trendy if lightweight "Ways of Seeing"; the first shows a nice painting of a cornfield with some birds flying above it, the second (overleaf) reproduces the same image with the caption "This is the last painting Van Gogh completed before he killed himself." The point being, of course, that what you know about a work of art in advance of actually experiencing it inevitably and irredeemably colours your judgement. Most readers of this publication will by now know something about the live-hard-die-young alto saxophonist Kaoru Abe (if not, you're strongly encouraged to read Eugene Chadbourne's mini-biography of the man on the All Music Guide site), and might therefore be tempted to listen for signs of his impending doom in this recording, made on August 29th 1978 in Hokkaido. The problem is that there's not much music to listen to: 14'27" of actual playing preceded by 1'41" of "rehearsal" (i.e. a couple of arpeggio flourishes, some shuffling of feet and the sound of Abe clearing his throat). The music, once it gets going, is as good as might be expected � Abe was a tempestuous blower indeed, and a saxophonist whose influence has stretched far and wide � but selling this album at full Japanese import price when the music it contains could fit on a 7" single is frankly nothing short of highway robbery.