The blues is, of course, a phantom presence in a lot of jazz, but it's rarely summoned as explicitly or to such beguiling effect as on Manchesterbased pianist Adam Fairhall's six-part suite The Imaginary Delta. As the title suggests, Fairhall is concerned with evoking the lost American South that gave rise to blues and early jazz, captured and viewed through an electronic 21st century prism. So, that means combining acoustic instruments (including the primitive, twanging diddley bow of poor rural blues) with modern laptops and turntables: Paul J. Rodgers' exquisitely placed samples from crackly blues records are stunningly evocative, making full use of the romantic allure of analogue sound. There's some stunning musicianship on these originals that veer from freejazz to ragtime to deep swing – and Fairhall's piano is a questing, quixotic voice with a comprehensive “inside and out” vocabulary that recalls some of Sun Ra's solo passages. This is armchair time travel of the highest order.