‘With Touch, the Tortoise bandmembers — Jeff Parker, Dan Bitney, Douglas McCombs, John Herndon, and John McEntire — harness their collectivist songwriting approach, a slightly anarchistic but resolutely egalitarian process where ideas triumph over ego towards an abstracted muscularity. While there are still excursions into the dusky, elegantly gnarled jazz ambience that flourished on landmark works like Millions Now Living Will Never Die and TNT, Touch is perhaps most remarkable for Tortoise’s unapologetic embrace of grand gesture. Aerodynamically re-engineered Krautrock, hand-cranked techno rave-ups, and pointillist spaghetti western fanfares are all imbued with Tortoise’s now-signature internal logic — equally alluring and confounding, a puzzle to be savored rather than solved.’

Duets by trumpet, or French horn, and guitar.

Solo, playing classical and 12 string guitars as if he were eight-handed — with a version of Goodbye, Pork Pie Hat and a Scott LaFaro in amongst the originals.

With Kenny Baker, Ronnie Scott, Tubby Hayes, Jeff Clyne.

Spiritual jazz vocal in the great tradition of Leon Thomas, Joe Lee Wilson and Andy Bey, with excellent versions of I’ve Known Rivers and Ooh Child, and several terrific modal numbers; fine backing. Recommended.

‘The ghosts of Armstrong and Handy smile down as Trovesi’s octet roars through a programme that cross-references the spirit of New Orleans with Italian popular song and European classical music.’

A village banda take on tunes from Italian opera — knees-up, sublime, lovely.

Top-notch quartet-jazz, feeling and brainy. MT evokes Trane — though no chordal instrument here — and Shorter (to Avishai Cohen’s Miles). There are tributes to Stevie — ‘master of the blues’ — and Ursula Le Guin. ‘It needs to be personal, meaningful, otherwise the blues can be banal. I believe it to be sacred, like a spiritual discipline.’

Reaching solo-piano explorations in blues, jazz and classical music by the Free Jazz pioneer, in 1970; inspired by the revolutionary spirit of the times, and — opening with a dedication to Don Cherry — the New Thing.

A second set of piano improvisations, one year after the first, now more extended, percussive, insistent, and tumultuous; explicitly enraged by the recent murder of George Jackson by a San Quentin guard, and the massacre at Attica Prison.