The middle is always the best part in any novel where all the detail and plot are played around with by the novelist and you get to know the characters. The phatic communion and niceties that have gone before by then are gone in the air. The how-do-you-do's and thoughts on the dismal drizzle and dreary light of the day and the gloom of the remains of the night to come and the long goodbye of parting are irrelevant and so far absent. And so it proves picking up the story from last week's track of the week, which was the first track here - yes - fans of the literal - 'The Beginning'.

The twist is that each part of this beginning, middle, end is a very open peroration to the power of five. Dave Liebman has vital things to say on 'The Middle' which is even more of a conversation where pianist Leo Genovese asks questions the sax machine finds answers to. But there is a simultaneous to and fro so you can't be linear where trumpeter Peter Evans and drummer Tyshawn Sorey are concerned.

Solo lines interrupt each other, these finish one another's sentences, these take bits, give things away, ''talk'' over each other, then come up with spontaneous ideas that nobody is stupid enough to throw away but acknowledge validity to and more to the point place their own meaning within.

'The Middle' is a remarkable more than half hour improvisation and because it was captured live it lacks the falseness of a studio recreation of the same feeling which producers do much to encourage and finesse and which is always a different kind of artefact.

You can't really hear bassist John Hébert too much at some points on the album, the only irritation, the miking favours Genovese most among the rhythm section and even there the piano could be higher definition upping its level in the mix. But sonic quibbling is anally subjective tricoteuse. Guillotine that thought.

Maximalist 'The End' is also long form and personal but bathed in quietude more. Liebman has an incredible discography - surely this is one of his greatest recent achievements because the band seem so as one with him. And there is an escapism in the freedom they all know how to describe via the best modernistic methods without deliberately being obtusely avant-garde which a lot of hipsters never get when they go way out. And here in such a room, a shrine of shrines for lovers of jazz clubs in New York City, is an instrument in itself: No one can fake a lived-in sound which ends up giving back to the musicians something from the fabric of the place as if everyone is communing with everyone who ever played in Smalls. Cory Weeds' Canadian label Cellar Live excels itself once again as a world class curatorial proposition choosing to release this Spike Wilner produced affair. Dave Liebman, master at work. Photo: the public domain