This album can nestle beside Dunmall’s recent Red Hot Ice, also on Discus, although the two are very different in style. Both discs involve large ensembles that bathe themselves in compositional detail, with individual solos subsumed into collective simultaneous expression.

Fanfares & Freedom is lavished with brass sounds, composed by Jurd as a commission from Tony Dudley-Evans and the Cheltenham Jazz Festival. Although premiered there in 2023, this is a recording of their Vortex performance from the same year, wonderfully captured with the balance of a studio session, but harnessing that gig’s live presence.

‘Fanfare 1’ opens with the horns, drums joining, passing from pert parts to free writhing, with ascending unisons and regularly punctuating blasts. Much is compressed into this three minute statement, showing the way ahead. There’s a brassy boldness, from tuba to top, as ‘Opening Out’ grasps the stylistic advantages of Brecht, Weill and Danny Kaye. The horns are often poised alone, with piano and drums biding their time.

Dunmall is deliberately the odd one, the only saxophonist in this delicate and pristine brass construction, playing soprano and tenor. Dunmall also provides his finely-detailed improvised engravings for the cover art. Marshall waddles around the blaring ‘bones, off his low-end leash, as the high-vaulting horns are soiled by solo burrowing.

We can term this fresh style ‘free colliery’, as ‘Onward Stomp’ comes on like something off Oh Yeah, by Charles Mingus, tuba and piano conversing, crowned by higher horns. Noble is itching to roll off onwards. For such a large group, there is a lot of space in the music, as smaller relationships are tested, with sustained detail and enquiry, with less emphasis on traditional tension, release and climaxing.