Mark Charig with Keith Tippett and Ann Winter
Pipedream (Ogun)
The Keith Tippett Septet
A Loose Kite in a Gentle Wind Floating with only my Will for an Anchor (Ogun)

IMAGINE the cold January of 1977 and the interior of a suburban Bristol church. Three musicians had congregated, accompanied by their friend, a recording engineer, to cut a unique album, lated to be issued with the title Pipedream.

There was a young woman vocalist, Ann Winter, with a bell, details of whose musical life seemed to have faded over subsequent years.

With her was a cornetist also carrying a tenor horn, Mark Charig, a Londoner born in 1944 whose earlier career had spanned jazz and advanced pop.

He had toured Europe with Stevie Wonder in 1966 and accompanied Long John Baldry, as well as playing with Soft Machine and King Crimson, also blowing trumpet in the exiled South African-based big band Brotherhood of Breath (1971-77), and had been one of 50 musicians assembled as the huge band Centipede for their momentous 1971 recording Septober Energy.

The third person not there for prayers was the man who had convened Centipede, the Bristolian pianist Keith Tippett, the son of a local policeman and jazz instigator with a rampant discovering mind and musical talent, a leader of experimental groups very large and small from solo genius and the magical beauty of the Ovary Lodge quartet to the roaring big band collaborations with South African musical comrades like Louis Moholo Moholo and Harry Miller.

Pipedream turned out to be an astonishing musical tryst and unlike anything else in a century of jazz.

As Winter’s stark bells chime and Charig’s naked horn peals out in the opener Bellaphon, the echoing soundwaves improvised from fanfares of the jazz spirit arise from the strange tension of secular notes blown through a sacred ambiance, and as Tippett’s grounding organ rumbles through the church it is as if its stones, beams and pews are somehow at ease with this ungodlike human artistry.

Ghostly Chances, preceding Ode to the Ghost of an Improvised Past, begins with Tippett’s zither and Winter’s eerie wordless vocal.

Whose ghosts these are remain untold — is it Buddy Bolden or Charlie Parker in Bristol or the souls of all those unknown musical talents who played their tunes and invented their notes in every village in western England?

At one point in the “Ode” we hear the steps of ghostly dancing — whose feet are these?

Did they burlesque their rulers in ironic versions of the Pavanne which follows, where Charig’s first breathy rasping notes make dialogue with Tippett’s springing organ?

The title track has a purity deep within its sonic body and Charig has never blown so beautifully and with so much relish as he does here in this virtually empty church, vocalising his horn and spitting his notes like a Bristol reborn Rex Stewart.

On to 1984 and septet session with the acme of long titles quoting from Maya Angelou: “A loose kite in a gentle wind floating with only my will for an anchor.”

It’s under Tippett’s leadership and with him and Charig are three more adventurous horns — tenorist Larry Stabbins, Elton Dean playing saxello and alto, and trombonist Nick Evans with bassist Paul Rogers and drummer Tony Levin, both members, with Tippett, of the quartet Mujician.

So there are old comrades musicking here, and the title suite in four movements and over an hour long, gives them plenty of sustenance.

The horns are rampant throughout, with an emphasis on sheer ensemble.

Levin’s drums are tight and swing hard in the first movement with Evans’s trombone sounding like a tailgate New Orleans parader.

Tippett’s piano runs crash like rapids water against rocks and the combined horn breaks leap skyward out of the rhythm.

Charig solos with long, crescending notes, then Evans, and Rogers’s bass sound trembles as if it were coming from the centre of the Earth. Dean’s saxello cries like some exalted bird.

All the horns have lyrical moments in turn as the second movement begins, slow and seemingly elegiac, racked in thought.

Dean’s solo chorus is full of radiance over Rogers’s plunging notes. Stabbins’s sinewy, outreaching tenor burns through the third movement until Evans’s roaring slides blast open another road for the final brief ensemble movement.

Dedicated of Mingus was written by Tippett in 1979, the year of the giant bassman’s death.

Mournful yet joyous and oracular, it features the marvellous Rogers in full solo power and virtuosity, holding Mingus’s transmigrated spirit.

His strings mine deep at their bottom and seethe like great bees at their height, as the ever-present Tippett rolls out his undertow.

It is a compelling end to an album of British jazz at its most original and excellent, and another expression of Tippett’s proud dictum: “May music never become just another way of making money.”