Letterpress-printed ticket for the Landscape Christmas / Xmas Party at the 100 Club on Monday 13 December 1976, with MC Lol Coxhill, Latin band Spiteri … and Rebop joining in on congas.

Poster / flyer for the Landscape Xmas Party at the 100 Club.

Miles Kington reviewed the Landscape Xmas Party in The Times, 20 December 1976.

At first sight there isn’t much to distinguish John Walters’s quintet Landscape from other jazz / rock small groups. They are loud, clatteringly efficient, rhythmically strong and fond of playing tunes which aren’t really tunes. But to get over 300 people along on a cold Monday night suggests they have more going for them than the usual qualities, and one advantage they have is that the group started life as a nine-piecer playing Walters’s ambitious arrangements. Even though scaled down to a quintet, they still retain a more spacious feel – the apparently freely declamatory music is in fact carefully orchestrated, down to the split-second, sharp-as-a-razor endings. (An art neglected by 99 out of 100 groups even though, as Humphrey Lyttelton once said, if you start well and finish well the audience will put up with anything in between.) They also use their sheer volume to contrast now and again with soft, pregnant stretches, though not often enough.

And they have a rewardingly unusual front line. The soprano saxophone of John Walters (whom I had seen just the night before, curiously, playing in Timothy Kramer’s and Peter Dickinson’s remarkable children’s opera, Like This, Like That) blends marvellously with Peter Thoms's shouting electronic trombone. Well, not electric exactly, but miked and linked to a big box of tricks worn on his belt. Until Thoms finally snares himself inextricably in a thrashing welter of slide and wires, Landscape should go on improving as one of the best jazz / rock units around and even, with luck, eventually break out of the category.

The evening was billed as their Christmas Party, and other festive fare was provided by a good average group called Spiteri and the lone soprano saxophonist Lol Coxhill. Looking for all the world like a backwoods Kojak, Coxhill has the nerve to play soprano totally unaccompanied for anything between ten minutes and an hour. The whole idea is mad and works superbly; I find his tone so ravishing and his ideas so haunting that I could listen for ever. For an hour, anyway.