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The brilliance behind a relentless upsurge

Chris McGregor’s Brotherhood of Breath
Procession: Live at Toulouse
(Ogun OGCD 040)

THE MOST accomplished and farthest out of the cream of British free jazz virtuosi were ever-eager to be a part of the Brotherhood of Breath, so they too could be a confrere of this astonishing and so often rampaging music direct from the deformity of apartheid-accursed South Africa.

This was the ’70s, when exiled South African horn-men like trumpeter Mongezi “Mongs” Feza and altoist Dudu Pukwana, pianist Chris McGregor, the bass pulse-makers Johnny Dyani and Harry Miller and the thunderous subtlety of drummer Louis Moholo-Moholo found creative comradeship with English jazz rebels like tenorists Alan Skidmore, Gary Windo and Evan Parker, altoists Mike Osborne and Elton Dean, trumpeters Mark Charig and the Barbadian ace Harry Beckett in a seething amalgam of sound.

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