Life isn't fair. Nearly 20 years after his death, pianist Don Pullen may be hymned by those in the know but even by jazz standards he is no household name. Yet the seven albums collected here offer conclusive proof that Pullen – born in Roanoke, Virginia, in 1941 – was one of the finest musicians of his generation. Stylistically, it's slippery stuff, one moment referencing stride, the next as frenzied as Cecil Taylor and his 88 tuned drums. Like Taylor, his harmonies are sometimes dissonant, splattered tone clusters referencing similar classical music infl uences, and his playing is at times spectacularly percussive. (The story is that Pullen played so hard that his hands were frequently blistered; for real wallop, he was known to employ the occasional elbow.) But that is only one side of the man who played in Mingus’ last great group, in the 1970s, as well as with Milford Graves the previous decade, and who was infl uenced by Art Tatum as well as Ornette and Eric Dolphy. ‘Evidence Of Things Unseen’ and ‘Healing Force’, title tracks, respectively, of two of the albums collected here, find Pullen in ruminative solo mode. But he could groove too: ‘Victory Dance (For Sharon)’, another track from Evidence Of Things Unseen, has shades of Adbullah Ibrahim. And if the relaxed, evocative ‘Sixth Sense’, title track of one of Pullen's finest albums, hasn't yet been nabbed as a superior TV show theme tune, then music supervisors are in for a treat. It all comes together on ‘Warriors Dance: Little Don Parts 1 and 2’, kicking off with a top-tapping, latin-infl uenced vamp but going progressively weirder and wilder until the head returns half an hour later. To play music so clearly infl uenced by free jazz, in no way watered down but offering such a clear way in, takes a true master. The Don.