When Baker came to London to play a week-long engagement at the much-missed Canteen venue way back in 1983, Messrs Horler, Richardson and Mann were hired as the battle-scarred American's accompanists. Fortunately, Richardson had the sense to switch on his tape-recorder, this remastered double-CD release the welcome outcome of that enterprise. Surprisingly, perhaps, given his many personal vicissitudes, Baker plays well throughout, even if the tone is less centred than it was, the ideas unfurling ably, the lines extending, the attack more assertive than might have been expected. He offers a long opening reading on ‘Have You Met Miss Jones’, hardly letting up, finding novel variations, seemingly concerned to avoid taking it easy. Horler, as he still does now, looks for interesting ways to navigate each of these 10 themes when his turn arises, his phrasing sometimes staccato, at others moving into Tatum-like complexities, Richardson and Mann, both still active these days, doing the necessary. ‘Beatrice’ by Sam Rivers is an interesting choice, Baker poised and spacious in his extemporisations, responding well to the tune's harmonic challenges – what an ear he had – even managing to sound quite skittish at times. Horler is dynamic over Richardson's walking bass, as ever offering the unexpected, before the bassist and Mann take their chances. Horler also takes off rewardingly on Jimmy Heath's ‘For Minors Only’, with Mann featured in breaks with Baker. With originals like those of Rivers and Heath alongside the expected standards, these prompting, inevitably, the occasional vocal, nasal and half-whispered, as on ‘The Touch Of Your Lips’, there's plenty here on which to ponder. Each of the pieces spread over the two CDs run just under or just over the 10-minute mark, Baker, for all his fragility, game and intent on exploring each of them to the full. “He seemed together, not distracted,” Horler recalled. “We even had a rehearsal.” It shows.