With 2016's Snowmelt and 2019's Viaduct (both featuring the London Sinfonietta), the Norwegian reeds virtuoso Marius Neset emerged as a chamber-orchestra composer capable of meticulously dissecting 20th century classical techniques in inspired detail, and reinventing them as dynamic jazz-improv frameworks. Tributes, written for the excellent Danish Radio Big Band under its prizewinning young composer/conductor Miho Hazama, is just as kaleidoscopically eventful as those releases, but Neset now shares the improvising with this band's fine soloists – and working again with an all-jazz lineup, and an autobiographical chronicling of his return to his native Norway after 17 years in Copenhagen, seems to have brought a more playfully laid-back ease to his handling of complex large-scale materials.

The effervescent ‘Bicycle Town’ (a portrayal of the city's two­wheeled transport culture) begins with Neset's unaccompanied tenor sax in a multiphonic, folksily skipping dance, drawn by the busily weaving counterpoint of scurrying low reeds and gliding flutes into a vivid impression of streets teeming with bikers. The lilting, sultry ‘Tribute’ sets soft fanfares against Hans Ulrik's soprano sax and in the process offhandedly hints at Beethoven, Mahler, and Queen, among others, ‘Farewell’ and ‘Leaving the Dock’ move between meditative Neset soprano lines, and a pumping, purposeful, new-horizons feel. The three-part finale ‘Children's Day’, skips from a mischievously skidding Django Batesian calypso, to Gerard Presencer's softly gleaming trumpet aria, and Neset's exultantly ascending final tenor solo as the band wraps cascading countermelodies around him. The composer calls Tributes ‘a new phase’ in his work and life, and it's not hard to hear why.