" data-original-title="" title="">Larry Stabbins after an eleven-year absence is headline news. In 2013, Stabbins (a.k.a. Stonephace) very publicly announced that he was beyond disgusted with the music business in general and the jazz business in particular and that he was leaving London and returning to the West Country where he was born and bred. We would be hearing no more from him on record or on stage.

"The music scene has changed drastically over the last 50 years and the cultural role of jazz is entirely different," wrote Stabbins in the core passage of the press statement announcing his retirement. "It attracted me when I began playing because it was rebellious, alternative, had a veneer of danger to it (drugs and debauchery) and it identified with the underdog (black people in racist societies) and had a generally anti-rightwing, anti-authoritarian political agenda. It also felt groundbreaking and exploratory. None of that seems to me to apply any more either to jazz or its spin-offs, such as improvised music. (I think I prefer Flying Lotus for the groundbreaking exploratory stuff)."

Many people could identify with Stabbins' sentiments , but—and hindsight is a wonderful thing—his timing was not so great. Less than two years after he quit, the British jazz scene was being refreshed, overhauled and rebooted by a new generation of musicians, many of them Black, personified by tenor saxophonist