The repertoire of Jazz In Britain’s Blue Beginnings collection mostly mirrors that of the celebrated Rendell/Carr quintet’s 1965 debut Shades of Blue (themed around the intention, as the leaders put it, ‘to play the blues either in form or feeling’), but this is a live version taped from the BBC’s It’s Jazz radio show in November 1964, a month after the Columbia studio session. At this take-off point, the group was already revealing its compositional originality (only two of the eight tracks, ‘Autumn Leaves’ and ‘You’ll Never Know’, are covers) and the punch and energetic confidence of its ensemble sound, though the influence of the Kind of Blue band and the early Coltrane quartet are unmistakeable, and pianist/composer Michael Garrick was yet to arrive with the atmospheric pieces that would give Rendell/Carr its most distinctive and indelible character. But if Blue Beginnings sounds a little like a warm-up for a pioneering band to come, it’s an engaging one. The flat-out lick-swapping improv of the co-leaders, bursting of a hurtling hook and bass-walking groove, makes a buttonholing opener of ‘Blue Doom’, while Ian Carr’s soft theme statement mingled with Don Rendell’s tenor rejoinders warmly remodels ‘Autumn Leaves’. Rendell’s ‘Garrison ‘64’ is a slow-rocking blues theme foregrounding the composer’s Coltranesque soprano sax lines, and pianist Colin Purbrook is in his Wynton Kelly-like element on Carr’s ‘Big City Strut’ - but ‘Shades of Blue’, with its lovely Neil Ardley melody and subtle use of a whirring tenor trill behind Carr’s gracefully Milesian solo is the standout, for its patiently lyrical exposition, and its foretaste of the unique compositional identity that would soon become the hallmark of one of British jazz’s finest bands.