For Moral Absolutists Only? Maybe

    I knew from an early age that this was a sine qua non in jazz. A large-ish group of players, many of whom I had already heard individually and found to be, in varying degrees, intimidating, if not actively terrifying. This was supposed to be the big blowout, the freeform frenzy to finalise it all. But in late seventies Glasgow, at a time when jazz was beyond question the least fashionable and marketable form of music, the record, in common with most of the important post-war jazz records, was impossible to find - even A Love Supreme remained out of print until 1979. Jazz Journal was an irritating entity at the best of times but did have its uses in that it carried advertisements for specialist record shops, mainly in London. I was particularly taken by Dave Carey's Swing Shop, opposite St Leonard's Church in Streatham; even though I never ordered anything from it, there was a sweetly sour romanticism about the concept of a place like Streatham, and when I eventually pass