One of the more obscure but loftiest masterpieces of British jazz, composer Neil Ardley's long-form suite Kaleidoscope Of Rainbows was released on the tiny Gull Records label in 1976. Its beauty and vitality have remained absolutely unsullied by the passing years and the album has been reissued a couple of times, most recently on Dusk Fire in 2005. In March 2021, the album has been joined by a previously unreleased live recording made at London's Queen Elizabeth Hall a year earlier. Performed by the same twelve-strong lineup of star players, Kaleidoscope Of Rainbows Live '75 features a far longer score, at one hour and forty-two minutes twice the length of the studio edition. It is recognisably the same piece of music but a substantially different one, too, and not just in duration. And it is another stone masterpiece.

Ardley conceived the piece as the final part of a trilogy which began with the albums Greek Variations (Decca, 1970) and A Symphony Of Amaranths (Regal Zonophone, 1972). It takes a small element of music—in this case a five note Balinese scale—and expands it into a large construction. In his liner notes for the studio recording, Ardley wrote that he was intent on "integrating the warmth and individual feeling of improvised music with the formal beauty of composition to the benefit of both." Ardley was, of course, aware of other musicians' work and that is, perhaps, reflected on both Kaleidoscope albums' occasional intersections with