Rosenwinkel's pure tone and unhurriedly graceful phrasing started building an audience in the 1990s, and though some of his storytelling vocal and multi-instrumental work can be an acquired taste, his skills as a jazz-guitar virtuoso with wide tastes have rightly kept him up there with the elite ever since.

With his formation of the core of this fine band in 2012, including young prodigy Aaron Parks on piano and Branford Marsalis bassist Eric Revis (for the Star of Jupiter album), Rosenwinkel unveiled a studio band with an urgent live feel. Now Undercover (Live at the Village Vanguard) takes that promising story a long way on, with Parks and Revis back, alongside Greg Hutchinson on drums, on a set of the leader's originals captured on the band's run at New York's Village Vanguard last October.

The mid-tempo opener ‘Cycle Five’, a modulating chord-melody that releases glistening streams of semiquavers from Rosenwinkel, opens the show on a hypnotic ear-worm, ‘The Past Intact’ is tonally 21st century but melodically and rhythmically boppish, reinforced by a beautifully-paced, faintly Corea-like Parks piano passage.

The pianist's rhapsodic solo intro to the tidal swell of ‘Solé’ is exquisite, ‘Our Secret World’ balances Hutchinson's hip-hoppish snap and Rosenwinkel's seamless long lines, and on the waltzing ‘Music’, Revis' delicate melodic dances with a closely-shadowing Parks are greeted with cheers, and a scything Rosenwinkel solo is driven by intensifying energy from Hutchinson. Great for guitar buffs, but also all devotees of one-touch, sharp-eared small-band jazz.