Gunter Hampel, 80, is a revered figure on the central European jazz scene and by all accounts one of the good guys, but you’d find me shifting awkwardly on my feet if you were to ask whether I’d really enjoyed this CD. There is much to admire. This is clearly the music of an explorer, also a committed improviser. Hampel is more interested in playing than performing, and the structures he generates from composed beginnings – the title-track feels like a distant cousin of Mingus’ ‘Fables of Faubus’, while the spiky energy of Eric Dolphy’s Out to Lunch! is never too far away – are fantastically chancy and volatile, paragraphs of sound nailed together like artisan furniture. But the more formal aspects of the music leave me cold. Cavana Lee-Hampel’s stylised scat singing dominates the written heads, which sound like a free jazzman’s reimagining of bebop, and such propriety, it seems to me, has no place here. ‘Smiling Energy’ tips all four musicians into a nonsense theatre of absurdist sounds, pratfalls and catcalls – this I like. Bernd Oezsevim is an effective if rather untidy drummer, but Johannes Schleiermacher makes rather heavy weather of it all, honking and mewling in search of an idea.