There’re a lot of line-ups throughout jazz’ history that find themselves lauded to the ceilings, usually for good reason. There’s Miles and Paul Chambers, there’s Coltrane and Rashied Ali. The list can go on. And while John Gilmore’s best known for his time with Sun Ra, a tossed off date with the sax player, who joins Paul Bley, Paul Motian and Gary Peacock for the 1964 Turns album. With such a ridiculous handful of precision jazz playing, it’s utterly unbelievable that the disc isn’t well documented, written about or even widely available. The MP3 copy I found is clearly a vinyl rip – though more than passable.

Either way, recorded in 1964, the disc still comes when that whole getting free thing was still in the process of solidifying itself within jazz nomenclature. Granted, Coltrane had already flipped out by this point, but it’d be a while before Sam Rivers and his ilk would go and expand on the saxophonist’s concepts as related to group improvisation. Bley, though, was already firmly rooted in the tropes comprising nascent free playing as a result of doing a couple sessions with Mr. Charles Parker during the preceding decades. Gigging – or even just being around – Mingus, Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry probably didn’t hurt much. But by 1964, the Canadian born pianist has already come to terms with the fact that while he – and his wife Carla – were well received in creative circles, there wasn’t much chance for breaking through to a commercial audience.

Listeners can almost hear that realization on a track like “Calls” as Gilmore sputters out some semblance of a theme while Bley occasionally plunks down Monk-esque phrases, seeming like commentary on those sax lines. As the track moves towards its end, Motian’s drumming gets a bit more aggressive even as Peacock remains largely out of the spotlight. His solo isn’t much of a feature – in length or content.

Even if the recording were an unmitigated failure – and it’s not – having such a collection of players warrants noting. As to be expected, the album’s title track winds up getting pretty chauncy. Beginning with an inviting bit of coolness, Bley shuts everyone up by breaking into Gilmore’s opening and does so with a handful of notes only tangentially related before getting into the rest of the song as it mounts towards something like a free-jazz version of the Peanuts theme song. Great, if not spectacular. But certainly worth the time in hunting down.