1. The Fugue #2 (take2) 12:37 
2. Moving Toward You
   (take 2) 6:00
3. Pointed 6:15
4. Love In The Middle Of The Air (take 1) 16:11
5. Clusterity 29:29
6. Moving Toward You
   (take 4) 3:39

Re-mastered from original sources by Malcolm Addey

Heiner Stadler
Retrospection

Structural concepts from European classical traditions applied to
the vitality and personal expressivity of American Jazz

As composer, record producer and impresario, Heiner Stadler moves across the borders of Jazz, blues, world and classical and contemporary music with ease and skill. Written and recorded during a period of just over ten years from the early sixties to the mid-seventies, the music on Retrospection emphasizes classical and modern techniques set inside large scale structures within which improvisation plays an integral role. In this music, the tension between composition and improvisation, the fixed and the free, the intellectual and the spontaneous,
the preordained and the unforeseen, is completely rethought and renegotiated in a process of composition, collaboration and realization. Featured performers on this record include a handful of top-notch musicians from the New York and German jazz scene.

Retrospection makes available, for the first time in one volume, Dee Dee Bridgewater's 16-minute tour de force on Lenore Kandel's poem "Love In The Middle Of The Air," combo tracks featuring trumpeter Jimmy Owens, saxists Joe Farrell and Tyrone Washington, trombonist Garnett Brown, pianists Don Friedman and Stadler himself, bassists Reggie Workman and Barre Phillips, drummers Joe Chambers and Brian Brake; a previously unreleased suite for the North German Radio Station Big Band with European improvisers Manfred Schoof, Gerd Dudek, Albert Mangelsdorff, and Wolfgand Dauner; and two sensitive performances by guitarist Mark Elf.

Like Jazz Alchemy, re-issued earlier this year on Labor (LAB 7024), and Stadler's seminal Tribute to Monk and Bird on the Tomato label, Retrospection revises definitions and provides new standards for the merging of jazz and contemporary composition. Together, these three albums air many of the fascinating experiments and exploits from the distinctive musical mind of Heiner Stadler.