This legendary group broke up under acrimonious circumstances and perhaps was never meant to be. Both the music and the internal politics of Circle were polarised around the approach of pianist Chick Corea, who decided that the music made by the quartet was becoming too unapproachable, and that of reedsman Anthony Braxton, whose resolute stance implied that to compromise the progress which the group was clearly capable of making would be to short-change both audiences and performers. While it lasted, the group which could simply have been a Weather Report from Hell, but which was in fact a key stage in the musical development of its members, produced this single recording in 1971. Corea drew his influences from the tradition of jazz piano, Latin music and the formal structures of the conservatoire tradition, while Braxton espoused radical compositional techniques which were able to deploy the ideas of post-Webern classical music and the innovations of the Chicago free jazz school with equal ease. All of this is present in this recording, which is an extraordinary one-off in every sense. --Roger Thomas