WHEN the Die Like a Dog Quartet was first convened in 1993, it was 23 years after the death of the dedicatee of the foursome’s first album, Albert Ayler, whose lifeless body had been recovered from New York’s East River in November 1970.

They were a unique quartet, whom half a century earlier would have been cast as fervent enemies: a German tenor saxophonist, Peter Brotzmann (pictured, top far left), born in Remscheid in 1941; a Japanese trumpeter who specialised in electronic sonics, Toshinori Kondo, who was born in 1948 in Ehime and educated at Kyoto University, and two African Americans, drummer Hamid Drake, born in the South in Monroe, Louisiana in 1955, and northerner William Parker (pictured, top middle), virtuoso bass player born in the Bronx in 1952.

These musicians had travelled many different roads before their eventual rendezvous and amalgam in Charlottenburg, Berlin, to cut a record for the Free Music Productions label, and now how their sounds, always singular and rampant, found a new unity and astonishing dynamism.