From Amazon.co.uk
Even if you decide you hate this recording and everything it stands for, this is an essential classic if you have any interest at all in large-scale jazz-derived composition. Long sought-after as a rare LP, this work dates from 1971 when anything seemed possible, to the extent that a massive avant-garde quasi-opera by composer/pianist Carla Bley and writer Paul Haines, boasting a "plot" which is enigmatic to the point of incomprehensibility and which draws on musical sources which range from the classic blaring of the American big bands to the European Serialist school of post-classical composition almost seemed par for the course. Throughout her career Bley has always seemed more interested in manipulating the structural devices of jazz than in allowing full rein to its tradition of improvisation. While this can occasionally make her smaller-scale work sound somewhat constipated, here it succeeds in holding together this vast, sprawling, nothing-like-it-before-or-since musical and literary edifice which is as essential, in its own way, as the suites of
Ellington.
--Roger Thomas