LOL COXHILL-COUSCOUS, LP, 1983, UK

With a full roster of Nato label notables at his disposal (Steve Beresford, Jac Berrocal, Mike Cooper, Roger Turner, Georgie Born and Joelle Leandre to name just a few), this legendary soprano/sopranino sax master tackles some oddly disparate idioms on Couscous. Unusually, the album begins not with any Coxhill music, but instead with a 7+ minute uncut excerpt of Buck Funk and the Rev. Antony W. Reeves from a scratchy old 1920's era wax cylinder disc playing playing some very mournful melancholic sounds. What follows is a near Globe Unity Orchestra-scale free jazz deconstruction of the proceeding piece, resulting in a New-Orleans-funeral-marching-band-gone-wonky sound that's gorgeously Ayler-esque. Though these deformations form the high point here, there's much else to love about Couscous, not least the seriously screwy album closer featuring Coxhill's trio formation The Recedents with Mike Cooper and Roger Turner, creating a work whose sound is precisely what you'd mentally conjure from the title "...And Lo! The Chapel Walls Trembled At The Voice Of The Mighty Cukoo".

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