At Kahil El Z Bar’s concert at the Flagey Jazz Festival in Brussels at the start of the year, David Murray was an illustrious special guest. He played with such impassioned brilliance that anybody of the opinion that he was not as relevant to the contemporary scene as he was in his 1980s heyday would have had to think again. This fine new album with an excellent quartet comprising younger players finds him on stellar form, making the perhaps overlooked point that the 69-year-old saxophonist has always been a strong composer as well as improviser.

Here the melodies are alternately joyous and romantic, keeping alive the flame of swing era heroes Don Byas and Ben Webster, particularly on the tunes in which a 4/4 beat has a subtle strain of dance. Yet Murray has always had a clear allegiance to the avant-garde, and the tonal vigour and acrobatic intervallic leaps of his lines on tenor and bass clarinet lend an incendiary energy to songs that achieve the all too rare feat of being simultaneously soothing and discomfiting. In the refined, careful pianist Marta Sanchez, supple bassist Luke Stewart and impactful drummer Russell Carter Murray has an ensemble to match the notable past iterations of his quartet (think John Hicks, Ray Drummond and Idris Muhammad). Murray may be defined by classic albums such as Home and Ming but this new work shows that he has lost none of his verve today, firmly taking his place among the elite group of musicians whose output has quality to match quantity.