Reedman Peter Long founded Echoes of Ellington 25 years ago and has always sought to present the late maestro's music with accuracy and spirit. Chancing to hear Gustav Holst's ‘Planets Suite’ while driving across country, he noted the commonality, harmonic and melodic, between the respective composers, Holst and Ellington, and felt impelled to recast the ‘Planets’ in Ducal mode. So he set to to recast all nine of Holst's planetary pieces as if Duke and Strayhorn had worked them over, much as they did the ‘Nutcracker’ and ‘Peer Gynt’ suites, assigning a key Echoes soloist to stand in for the appropriate Ellingtonian. Thus Davison covers for Clark Terry on the very sprightly ‘Mercury’ unfurling a solo full of sparky variation, before altoist Marsh takes ‘Venus’ for a Hodges-like meander. Dowdeswell, a celebrated high-note specialist, is positively Cat-like on ‘Mars’, the effect both startling and quite magnificent while Craig is suitably avuncular on ‘Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity’. Long himself stars on ‘Uranus’, Quigley rounding off ‘Neptune’ in stratospheric fashion. It's crucial to say that Long's writing throughout is of the tour-de-force variety, suitably Ducal in sound and intention, richly impressive, often exciting, Holst's themes emerging either from the ensemble passages or via the individual solo statements. I'll leave it to others to judge the rights and wrongs of adapting Holst's work in this fashion, as ‘jazzing the classics’ has always been a matter of controversy. Suffice it to say that Long's stable of like-minded players has done the project proud, performing with abundant creativity and panache. It's 100 years since Holst premiered the ‘Planets’ and at about the same time Ellington was getting off the compositional mark himself. Would the great man have approved of Long's endeavours? For sure. By any measure, this is a landmark achievement.