Having started his career as a trumpeter and occasional singer with Mike Westbrook, by the mid-'70s Phil Minton was fully committed to vocal improvisation, employing a tonal and timbral range that at times seems almost uncanny.

Right from the start he has rarely chosen to interpret jazz standards, preferring to work with texts from sources as diverse as Ho Chi Minh, Shakespeare and e.e.cummings, shaping and re-shaping them in a spectacular display of vocal gymnastics. Over the past decade even these scraps of text have largely disappeared, giving way to a music that is entirely composed of yelps, barks and wails that parallel the extended techniques employed by radical instrumentalists.