Bassist Ben Allison has had a quite extraordinary recording career. During his early days in New York he had nine CDs as leader on Palmetto. This writer found two from around 2003 in his collection – Peace Pipe and Buzz (by his then band Medicine Wheel), which includes The Beatles' ‘Across the Universe’. He and some of his contemporaries formed the influential Jazz Composers Collective, among them Kimbrough (who has played on virtually every single Allison album), Cardenas and saxophonists Michael Blake and Ted Nash. He now has his own label, Sonic Camera, and this is its second release. I saw him live in London as a sideman with Jeremy Pelt and was very impressed. Pelt is the sideman here and displays his diversity and versatility on seven mostly excellent, deceptively simple, Allison compositions, cleverly scored for trumpet, guitar and piano. The opener, ‘Magic Number’ is a down-tempo disguised blues with Allison's anchoring exceptional, and great solos all round. Several of the tunes are in similar vein, with the exception of the forceful title tune and the closing electronically-infused ‘Get Me Offa This Thing’, though Kimbrough takes off into free jazz territory on a couple of others. Pelt and Cardenas play sensitively throughout. This is the kind of record that makes you play it again, especially ‘Magic Number’.