"Not since Don Cherry and Ed Blackwell joined forces have two musicians so organically wedded world music influences with free jazz. The resultant music is connected to history and culture yet true to its contemporary American roots. And the rhythms groove so deeply that if dance-club DJs got hold of this CD, all America would be moving to it." – JAZZIZ

Volume 2: Summer Snow represents the second immaculate studio session of two of the greatest musical beings America has to offer the world. The recent expanded issue of their first duo meeting–First Communion + Piercing The Veil: Volume 1 Complete–displayed their eternal prowess via intensity in full, redefining drum & bass in any music. Summer Snow reveals Parker and Drake in a more meditative state, with Parker focusing on the doson'ngoni (Mali hunter's guitar) and shakuhachi (Japanese bamboo flute). Five years have passed since their first meeting, and a whole lot has changed, so catch up! – Amazon

Thankfully, the brains behind this double-disc reissue of two almost forgotten 1970 sessions determined that the first CD should be simply the six tracks originally released on the America label. The false starts and incomplete and alternate takes are left for the second disc. This way, the album closes properly – in a fit of passion, with Mingus's sextet spinning intense yarns out of "Pithecanthropus Erectus," a tune un-recorded in the studio since 1956. Here, Jaki Byard gets a midnight solo, wobbling on the rails between his well-known clustering talent and his deeply lyrical bent. Bobby Jones on tenor, Charles McPherson on alto, and Eddie Preston on trumpet offer a variety of predispositions, mostly post-bop but certainly aware of the tonal advances Eric Dolphy made with Mingus. "I Left My Heart in San Francisco" is lovely, slightly tense – which helps with the drama, and "Peggy's Blue Skylight" is dynamic and lazily vigorous. As for the second disc, it's instructional in how Mingus the bandleader thought and led: beyond that, it's for the initiates only. Keep in mind that these tunes comprise the first studio album Mingus made after Mingus, Mingus, Mingus, Mingus, Mingus and show the bassist returning to the forge, readying himself for the great stuff yet to come with George Adams and Don Pullen. –Andrew Bartlett

Rick Tomlinson aka Voice of the Seven Woods stumbled in to Manchester's vivid musical landscape as a vinyl hungry psyched-out sidekick to Andy Votel on his formative Twisted Nerve road show. The self-taught jack of all musical trades has since drawn influence from an oblique archive of obscure LPs and bizarre instruments and forged his own unique approach to making music, his very own hybrid blend of instrumental progressive folk. Enlisting the skills of drummer Chris Walmsley in a quest to create the authentic sound typified by the likes of Tery Cox in Pentangle with an added rhythmic influence of Turkish psychedelic bands first heard in the mid 70's, who has recorded with forward thinking groups like Broadcast, along with upright bass player Paul Blakesley - both of which are the perfect reactionary accompaniment to Rick's sporadic flirtations with time and tempo. – Amazon