The Cortège (2CDs) Enja* * * * *

Long unavailable and reissued for Mike Westbrook’s 75th birthday, this is the great composer at a 1970s peak, creating music for his 17-piece orchestra (including his binary star, wife Kate) quite unlike anyone else’s. A natural eclectic who shapes his eclecticism to say what he has to say, Westbrook takes poems by Lorca, Blake, Rimbaud, Hesse, Clare, dialect pieces from Italy and Finland, English and Swedish folk song and binds them (very loosely) round the Life-Death-Life parade of a New Orleans funeral. Woven into it are threads of English folk myth, Andalusian processional and political comment. Notwithstanding any intellectual underpinnings, the music has the capacity to reflect the universal in the diversity of the particular; and behind its colour and organisation is a freedom and malleability that brings out the best in a superb band. Like Westbrook, it’s unique. See enjarecords.com