This live 1968 Berlin Jazz Days recording of “Jazz in the Church” arose from the festival’s desire to shine a light on the music’s religious aspects. Two leading European Avant-gardists were commissioned to present works to be played in Berlin’s Sudstern Church. German Keyboardist Wolfgang Dauner already stood at the forefront of European jazz. Continually a winner of European jazz polls, his trio of Eberhard Weber and Fred Braceful, anchor the piece, with two of Germany’s foremost horn players and the St. Martin Kantorei rounding out the ensemble. On Dauner’s Psalmus Spei, songs, texts, chants, whispers and moans mingle with melodic riffs and free instrumental passages to achieve an impressively colorful emotional palette. A pioneer of European free jazz, Belgium’s Fred Van Hove fronts a septet of leading players in the European free music scene, including Dutchmen Willem Breuker, Han Bennik, and German Peter Kovald. Based on Martin Luther's choral "Mitten wir im Leben sin von dem Tod umgeben", Hove’s Requiem has its moments of serenity; more often it recalls the tempest, as the musicians explore the sonic limits of their instruments, and the organ throws blankets of sound over the proceedings; colors and textures are more to the point than melody, but Albert Aylerlisch hymns occasionally resonate, and there is even a hint of Iberia some 10 minutes in.