The trio of iconic (West) German tenor-slinger, Peter Brötzmann, Dutch drummer Han Bennink and Belgian pianist Fred van Hove evolved out of the octet that recorded Brötzmann’s Machine Gun in 1968. This live recording captures them a year before van Hove left the group in 1975, at a time when they’d been performing together intensively for several years. It positively rages with energy and ideas.

While American free-jazz is an influence – detectable in Brötzmann’s wailing skronk, Bennink’s savage bursts of power-swing and van Hove’s percussive post-Cecil Taylor kineticism – it’s also clear how much of a break with that tradition they’d effected by this point. Sui generis moods appear out of nowhere – the piano spraying notes over rattling tin-can percussion and a buzzing mutter from the sax, or Bennink slotting into a clipped military march over woozy stride piano. There’s a sense that they’re free to follow their imaginations anywhere the moment suggests.

Bennink is credited as playing drums but he’s also audible indulging in extra-curricular antics – shouting, bellowing into an alpine horn and playing what sounds like another sax. It was this showboating that eventually prompted van Hove’s departure, signalling the end of one of the most singular units of all time.