John Stevens, Paul Rutherford, Evan Parker and Barry Guy

One Four and Two Twos

(Emanem)

In August 1978 they came together again for a recording at London's Riverside Studios.

A British quartet of powerful pioneer improvisers - drummer John Stevens, who organised the session, bassist Barry Guy and the two monster horns, saxophonist Evan Parker and trombonist Paul Rutherford.

They prepared themselves with a lengthy sound check for a date which never, in truth, actually happened. As Parker remembers it: "We went to the pub and never got back."

As is so often the fortuitousness of jazz, the sound check itself was well-recorded, becoming the real thing and being issued as an album in 1980.

All four musicians knew each others' sounds intimately, and had played together before on many occasions, particularly 10 years before when as a quartet they were one formation of the pioneering Spontaneous Music Ensemble (which first recorded in 1966).

Stevens and Rutherford had first met and played together while on national service with the RAF.

Guy and Rutherford had both been members - with Sheffield guitarist Derek Bailey - of revolutionary trio Iskra 1903, whose recorded concert at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1970 became pathbreaking album Chapter One.

Stevens and Rutherford, both born in 1940, and Guy (born 1947) were Londoners and Parker was a Bristolian born in 1944. The union of four profound innovators was bound to create a ceaseless musical combustion.

The album with the quizzical numerical title One Four and Two Twos is made up of five quartet pieces and five more from two different duos all named in mixed numbers.

The versatile foursome includes Stevens's drumset and voice, Rutherford's euphonium and trombone, Parker's tenor and soprano saxophones and Guy with his bass and electronics.

1,4,4, begins the proceedings with Stevens's scuttling drumplay and exclamations and Guy's scraping bass. Rutherford enters below them, his unstoppable slides ricocheting across a forest of sounds.

The much longer 2,4,4, gives Parker's squelching tenor a more prominent place in a fevered horn colloquy, with Rutherford moving up and down the fullness of his sound as if he were now being blown to unknown places in the midst of a typhoon.

3,4,4, - which follows - has a haunting timbre, with Guy's ghostly artistry everywhere in the soundscape and Rutherford's low, low notes creating a strangely spectral blues pitch.

In the ever-changing world of jazz the unified sound of these four Englishmen was unique in its time. Their music was entirely their creation. Nothing like it was being conceived or played on either side of the Atlantic, except by their other British confreres playing in related formations.

It was a very specific territory of jazz improvisation that had been birthed in post-war English cities like London, Bristol and Sheffield.

Through the 18 astonishing minutes of 4,4,4, - with all four musicians playing out of their skins with the deepest of empathies with each other - the listener begins to realise the true scope of their artistic achievement.

The speed, agility and invention of Stevens's drumming is ear-dazzling as he lays out the earth beside and below his three bandmates.

Parker's huge wasp-like buzzing phrases, Rutherford's continuous and smoothly growling commentary and Guy's flickering genius gyrate in all the spaces around the drumplay to make an amalgam of sound that is peerless.

As for the duos, the Guy/Rutherford colloquy - beginning with a seething Rutherford howl and continuing with excitation of a debate of sounds on 1,3,2, and the more delving 2,3,2, is like two voices in call, response and dialogue of sheer surprise, with the unexpected falling from every note and managed by two master musicians with life-dedicated technique. Rutherford's infusion of electronics adds an even more modernistic vein.

Parker and Stevens are head-to-head on 1,2,2, and 2,2,2, - a giants' pathway of sound with the Bristolian's tenor sounding like no other horn in jazz, chuntering, gossiping, declaring and confessing.

Thanks to Martin Davidson and Emanem records for enabling such sounds to enter our lives, ears and homes some 40 years later. They don't grow stale.