A remarkable sound moving into futuristic overdrive that still is way ahead of its time is preserved on Lifting the Bandstand and that emanates from the first imaginer of freely improvised jazz and one of its greatest revolutionaries Cecil Taylor and a group of players who understand and ''get'' not just his every move but live themselves inside the sound. This recording of the Cecil Taylor quintet at the Tampere Jazz Happening was made in the Finnish city on 30 October 1998.

There is no gloss and everyone integrates so it is certainly not a case of Cecil Taylor and others in attendance. Harri Sjöström on soprano saxophone is very impressive paving the way at times for the secrets of 'Desperados' to emerge as he curls around tonal blocks and responds to the sheer maelstrom of it all.

Witness lightning in a bottle, music that is as free as it is possible to be shaped around imagistic abstract expressionism and not at all vague freak-outs or sheer heat worked up through jamming, a very different thing and set of priorities indeed.

Certainly extravagant music but where the violence of its sound is translated into a cycle of life and death that will make you not just think but feel and that rewards close listening. You will probably learn more about riding shotgun on the back of the improvisations here than on any record released so far this year. Somehow as a listener you become part of the sound itself that has immediately expanded into another sensory realm in a remarkably short space of time. Tristan Honsinger is on cello, Paul Lovens on drums and Teppo Hauta-aho on double bass complete the group.

An astonishing recording then that has only been heard to date on Finnish radio and never officially on a record, a fact that makes Lifting the Bandstand even more of an event than it already patently is. SG

Released by the Polish label Fundacja Słuchaj, and out now