This liner-note begins, unusually, with a charitable appeal. Music reviewers and critics labour in obscure conditions, but this is not an appeal for better pay or more respect. Many of these poor souls suffer from a deeply embarrassing ailment that directly bears on their ability to function at all. As first the co-author and later sole author of a very large jazz reference book, I've had the symptoms for years. The condition is known to the very few doctors who recognize it as Adjective Fatigue, the inability to find new ways of praising—harshness, when called for, is always easier—the music we love. One of our colleagues, on contracting the complaint, resorted to an ever-smaller store of descriptors, to the extent that at one point he quite literally could not find another way of describing the sound of a tenor saxophone than "warm." I present with a more florid form which in its acute phase can lead sufferers to use apodictic, eleemosynary and trigeminal for the simple and single reason that they have never used them before. This, of course, leaves the suffering critic subject to the mockery of his peers, and the occasional thrown beer mat.

How do you find new ways of praising, let alone describing, the sound of this music? Most of us have played through a challenging new CD, faced the blank page and rejected "angular" as clich��d and worn-out. Language gets tired, but there is no merit in taking the easy way out and claiming that the very act of verbalising thoughts on music or art is beside the point. What a foolish notion? Someone—and he will remain nameless—said that talking about music was as irrelevant as dancing about architecture. Dumb: I can think of few better ways of celebrating a space than dancing around it...

But this doesn't much help with the present case, the music of