What is often considered the major long-form composition by Mary Lou Williams, her ‘Zodiac Suite’, had a chequered career during her lifetime. Merging her jazz sensibility with writing for a classical ensemble, she sought to expand her compositional language. Her best-known recording of material from it is her own reduction of four movements for piano trio, made in June 1945.

But fragments survive of the orchestral concert performance at New York Town Hall in December that year, and then she reprised three movements from it, in a jazzier arrangement by Melba Liston, with Dizzy Gillespie’s big band in 1957, at the Newport Festival. After getting to know her executor and friend, Father Peter O’Brien, pianist Aaron Diehl resolved to honour the memory of both Mary Lou and the Father, by assembling a full recorded performance of the suite.

A polymath who combines being a superb pianist, bandleader and choir director (at St Joseph’s Church in Harlem) Diehl is also a man of other extraordinary talents, being a qualified pilot with considerable aeronautical expertise. So there is nobody better to take on a project such as this, and lovingly to preserve this fusion of what he describes as ‘the language of black American folk music into this very Eurocentric identity’.

The orchestral writing and playing shimmers with a life only occasionally apparent in the 1945 recording, although despite Nicole Glover’s excellent efforts, she doesn’t quite match up to Ben Webster’s peerless solo on the original of the movement called ‘Cancer’. By contrast, Evan Christopher’s effervescent clarinet brings new life to ‘Gemini’, and this plus ‘Taurus’, ‘Virgo’ and ‘Aries’ are fine expansions of the composer’s piano trio versions, notably ‘Taurus’ which has Diehl’s own playing at its heart.

From a jazz perspective, the Gillespie recording of “Virgo’, ‘Libra’ and ‘Aries’ shows off Mary Lou’s own pianism in the context of a sensitive yet hard-swinging big band, and those who know this recording might find Diehl’s version strangely lacking in jazz sensibility. But that’s not the point, he’s worked hard to create a consistent vision of the entire work, and its delicate balancing of different musical traditions, and in this he has succeeded exceptionally well.