Holy grail rarity and brit jazz gem finally gets reissued by Decca. Pendulum, the stunning debut album by Mike Taylor Quartet, was recorded for legendary British jazz producer Denis Preston at the famed Lansdowne Studios. The album is split between reworked standards arranged by Taylor on Side A (including a radical rework of Dizzy Gillespie’s A Night in Tunisia) and original compositions from Taylor on Side B.

The tragic story of Taylor’s life and death, aged 30, after he walked into the sea in 1969, cut short the life of one of the key players in the development of British jazz and whose story reads like that of a grand opera, embracing exceptional music, high drama, mental illness, drugs and death.

Pendulum (first released in 1966) has been remastered at Gearbox Records’ Studios, London, with the high resolution digital source files, taken from the original master tapes, transferred to a Studer C37 reel-to-reel tape machine and mastered using an all-valve analogue mastering chain, including an ex-Decca Studio 3-band EQ and Telefunken U73b compressors.