The in-demand cornetist's recent ventures include Michael Formanek's ECM album The Distance, Matt Wilson's Big Happy Family and collaborations with Charlie Hunter, Myra Melford and producer/keyboardist Jamie Saft. Here, he applies his leftfield aesthetic to the Don Cherry/Ornette Coleman songbook, sparsely accompanied by acoustic bass and drums. Kirk Knuffke is a strong player with a fine-tuned technique. Impressively, he transfers Cherry's spiky lines and Coleman's songlike melodies to cornet without losing the brittle edge that made the originals so emotionally attractive. But there, the similarities end. The cornetist adds a sharply focused articulation and hidden sense of harmony to his melodic flow, and each note is precision made, whether delivered straight, smeared or sustained with a hint of breath or vibrato. And with bassist Anderson and drummer Nussbaum keeping it simple, Knuffke's fine-etched lines really bring out each composition's innate lyricism. The set begins with Cherry's reggae inflected ‘Roland Alfonso’ and continues with Coleman's tempo-changing ‘The Sphinx’. ‘Golden Heart’ switches from balladry to a dance, while ‘Song in D’ is a plangent highlight of toasting cornet over half-time bass. And ‘Lonely Woman’, one of five Coleman compositions in this 12-track set, is delivered beautifully without a hint of histrionics. The set ends with ‘Cherryco’, the title-track, composed by Don Cherry for his 1960 Atlantic recording with John Coltrane, The Avant-Garde. Knuffke pulls at the pulse, duets with Nussbaum's drums and then hits his stride, holding the listener from first to last.