Latest CD releases reviewed.

SCOTT HAMILTON/HARRY ALLEN
Heavy Juice Concord
*****

No bridges crossed, boats burned or boundaries stretched - just two top-of-the-range mainstream tenors in prime form, with a buoyant rhythm section and no ego beyond serving the music and making it sound good. Hamilton and Allen share influences, but they're a question of emphasis; Hamilton is more Webster/Jacquet, Allen more Getzian, yet each is now a rounded, unmistakable individual. The repertoire is mostly originals by Webster, Gillespie, Ammons-Stitt, Ellington and Tiny Bradshaw, plus a pair of standards, and the rhythm section of John Bunch, Dennis Irwin and Chuck Riggs is an unobtrusive spur to the front-line action. This is one of thosedates when everybody's lucky charm must have been working overtime. Two-tenor mainstream jazz doesn't come much better. - Ray Comiskey

MIKE TAYLOR
Trio Universal
****

Pianist/composer Taylor was a brilliant but troubled talent who, like the fictional Reginald Perrin, walked into the sea one day in 1969 and drowned. This album, the second and final under his name, was made three years earlier; in it can be heard a highly original voice, influenced by Bill Evans, but darker and more wide-ranging, espousing considerable freedoms, rhythmic, harmonic and linear. With the remarkable John Hiseman on drums, and either Jack Bruce or Ron Rubin (sometimes both) on bass, he unpicks standards like Stella By Starlight, All The Things You Are and The End of a Love Affair and alchemises them into something rich and strange. His own thoughts on the blues form, Just a Blues and Two Autumns, are no less striking, while Abena is a beautiful expression of melancholy. - Ray Comiskey

AMANCIO D'SILVA
Integration  Universal
***

Another Universal reissue underlines how open to other cultures was British jazz in the late-'60s and early '70s. D'Silva was a fine guitarist from Portuguese Goa in India, where he absorbed the area's musical melting pot and mixed it with jazz. In Britain he met trumpeter and flugelhorn player Ian Carr, saxophonist Don Rendell, bassist Dave Green and drummer Trevor Tomkins and, using permutations from the basic quintet format, effected a virtually seamless integration of jazz and Indian elements on this long-deleted album. Rendell, especially, is astonishing, whether playing free with D'Silva and Green on the title track, or turning in remarkable tenor solos on the guitarist's atmospheric Ganges and Jaipur. He's not, more's the pity, on every track, but the others, notably Tomkins and Carr, add weight to an enjoyable release. - Ray Comiskey