Säd AfricaLost Marble ****

An anarcho-syndicalist commune masquerading as a big band, with a wicked sense of humour and a healthy disrespect for musical orthodoxy, Loose Tubes blew the cobwebs off the UK jazz scene in the 1980s. Alas, their three studio albums went out of print before the digital age and remain unavailable. However, the band's lead composer and agitator-in-chief, keyboardist Django Bates, laid his hands on the tapes of the ensemble's farewell concerts at Ronnie Scotts in September 1990, and a first instalment culled from those sessions (Dancing on Firth Street) was released to general acclaim in 2010. It appears that Bates was holding some of the good stuff back. Säd Afrika brilliantly captures the exuberance, mayhem and general hilarity that attended the band's performances. Despite the title, there is nothing sad about the music, but Africa was very much on their minds (Nelson Mandela had been released just a few months earlier), and the spirit of musical liberation shines through. loosetubes.com