Headed by Boston vibes player Bobby Naughton (1944-2022), the Nature’s Consort collective are exemplary of a DIY movement that emerged during the late ‘60s from the licenses of free jazz, yet struggled to get wider acclaim as attention was focussed on the big guns. Nowt changes, eh? Despite lack of crowds or label backing, Nature’s Consort, as part of a self-organising rhizome of artists and bands - arguably pioneers of networks usually attributed to punk - would get their shit together and do it themselves, capturing inspired performances in non-studio settings and hustling them onto self-funded vinyl pressings, typically (as this one was) in handmade sleeve artwork. Whilst the old-style gatefold sleeve of this new pressing of Nature’s Consort’s eponymous album is factory produced, the steaming pressure of the music is not, and extends unmissable invitation to immerse in the space with them, breaking down the player-audience barrier like some basement show where you can almost smell the performers. 

It’s not hard to hear why snapshots of this sound, when it was fresh off the block, now trade for mad money. As epitomised in this recording of Nature’s Consort at an outdoor concert in New Haven, Connecticut, 10/12/69, the instruments may be acoustic but the vibes are electrifying as the unit of Naughton (piano), Laurnce Cook (percussion), James Dubois (brass), Mario Pavone (double bass), and Mark Whitecap (reeds) throw down with an alert deftness and bristling energy. Kicking off with the wigged-out post-hard bop of ‘Around Again’, they lock around a cracking breakbeat as the music edges of psych-rock terrain but still vitally free jazz in ‘Nital Rock’, before loosening up, scattering out with ‘Taking Steps’, and pulling back to the sort of atmospheric gesture that would prompt later ambient pioneers in the evocative soundscaping of ’Snow’, and a sizzling closer ‘From the Centre’ reminding of Khan Jamal Creative Arts Ensemble works from the same era. Blessings to Aguirre, then, for making this lightening in a bottle available to ears who can’t shell a few weeks wages on OGs.