Liberated from the archives, this 1980 live set documents Irène Schweizer's only collaboration with Don Cherry, as part of a quintet with saxophonist John Tchicai, bassist Léon Francioli and drummer Pierre Favre. The first track starts on a cold open, as the engineer raises the fader on what is already a simmering concert. As Cherry and Tchicai make short, declarative statements, Schweizer's piano marches forward in tight agitated clusters, like the soundtrack to some Russian futurist hymn to technology. Under all this comes a wrenching cyborg croak, like Captain Beefheart puking into a megaphone. This is soon revealed to be Francioli, bowing with remarkable agility, despite the pressure he's applying to the strings.

Things get a little funkier as the quintet fall behind the kind of oddly swinging theme you'd associate with Cherry's Where Is Brooklyn?, with Schweizer getting as close to stride as a European free jazzer can get. Pierre Favre's hyperactive ride cymbals set a Francioli solo feature of fleet runs, mid-range gulps and cheekily pinched strings, before Tchicai leaps back in with a hard, raspy squall. Schweizer's solo feature is quite brilliant, as she goes from short crab-like moves to parabolic arcs across the keyboard, before settling into a European lyric mode that slots beautifully behind Cherry's trumpet.

The lengthy second cut begins in a more fragmentary fashion, with Tchicai blabberinç theatrically between hearty blasts of alto. Francioli quotes the secondary melody of "Three Blind Mice", a curiously goofy gambit that reaps dividends when the whole group reprise the figure later on. If this all sounds a bit too like the Two Ronnies sketch where Cleo Laine and Johnny Dankworth scat the nursery rhyme, fear not: it's pulled off with winning chutzpah and doesn't sound remotely wacky. This group has a great knack of laying syncopation under clockwork figures and jerky militaristic struts. In one particularly strong passage, the sax and piano double up on a Philip Glass-like ostinato that gradually shakes itself loose into a funky Caledonian canter, like Brigadoon scored by Charles Mingus. For the bulk of the third track, the quintet rides a hip "Linus And Lucy" riff, before Francioli's arco bass introduces a lyrical theme by Danish composer Pierre Dørge that Tchicai brings to full flower. Sounding as fresh as the day it was recorded, Musical Monsters is a fantastic piece of European free jazz.

Like Hitchcock's Ten Little Indians, those that make up the fabric of the jazz tapestry keep passing, leaving holes impossible to mend. American trumpeter Don Cherry died in 1995, Danish saxophonist John Tchicai in 2012. And March 2016 witnessed the demise of bassist Léon Francioli at 69, bulwark of the Swiss rhythm section, alongside pianist Irène Schweizer and drummer Pierre Favre, found on this marvelous unearthed gem from the 1980 Jazzfestival Willisau. This concert is also a reunion of sorts, Cherry and Tchicai part of the New York Contemporary Five some 16 years earlier.
You may not know Francioli nearly as well as the other members of this quintet but that's your fault, not his. The 1970 Nolilanga LP he led for Evasion Disques is a wonder as are his projects with Favre and French reed player Michel Portal, appearances with German trombonist Albert Mangelsdorff and American saxophonist/trumpeter Joe McPhee and the Bovard/ Bourquin/Francioli/Clerc quartet. He makes his gooey presence felt five minutes into the first part of this four-section eponymous suite with an absolute Monster (pun intended) of a solo. Elsewhere, his strings snap with the accuracy of trained archers.

The music is refreshingly focused for a one-off concert setting. Tchicai introduces a quick figure about five minutes into the second section, which Schweizer echoes, quieting down the proceedings before Francioli and Favre support it with a martial rhythm and Cherry soars overhead. Tchicai's themes are the connective tissue of the concert (with fellow Dane Pierre Dørge's "Xongly" laying the foundations of Part 3), as is his ecstatic glossolalia vocalizing. Schweizer, Francioli and Favre work together as a dynamic section, the latter, who had worked extensively with both, acting as a rhythmic translator. It is tempting to think of Cherry as the odd man out but that overlooks how he had made himself integral to the scenes of various countries in his travels during his career, far less Ugly American than International Citizen.