Featuring truly a 'who's who' of late 60s British jazz, this professionally recorded concert, recorded April 18, 1969 in Germany, has never before been released. At the time of the recording of this show, Surman had just finished recording his second album as a leader, How Many Clouds Can You See, so this is a unique chance to get an expanded view of his formative work as a leader and also at the early work of his musical compatriots who appear here with him. Surman states that "choice of material was up to me... and I wrote several pieces especially for the workshop-but it was customary to invite a few participants to bring a piece of their own if they wanted to; hence the pieces from Kenny, Erich, and Fritz."
In the early 1900s Bela Bartok was introduced to the folk music of the Romanian people in Transylvania. His immediate infatuation with the music led him to a lifelong pursuit to record and catalog these beautiful regional pieces. Bartok spent eight years traveling the Romanian countryside recording and transcribing these pieces, which he would spend the rest of his life collating into six catalogs containing over three thousand tunes, simply entitled Romanian Folk Music. The composer's own compositions would be influenced at every level by his folk studies. // A century later, three outstanding improvisers - Mat Maneri, Lucian Ban and John Surman - draw fresh inspiration from the music that fired Bartok's imagination, looking again at the carols, lamentations, love songs, dowry songs and more which the composer collected, in the period between 1909-1917.
