"The steel pan of course has no particular history in jazz music itself, unlike many other instruments,” explains bandleader and steel-pan player extraordinaire Mark Cherrie: “While some might regard this as a hindrance, I always felt that this was in fact liberating, since as a writer & player, I didn’t feel particularly married to any period of jazz's rich history. It enabled me to dance around any era of jazz's evolution.”

Accordingly Cherrie and his team do indeed manage to dance – and will potentially have you dancing along – on second album Any Anxious Colour, which began to take shape during the pandemic and sees Cherrie contributing most of the tunes, in contrast to previous outing Joining the Dots, which featured many rock covers (including ‘Little Wing’ and ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’).

Those self-penned tunes certainly have plenty of character, and the treatments are broad and ambitious stylistically: there's the calypso of ‘Ole Mas’, the cha-cha of ‘The Search’ and two ballads written for Cherrie's daughter, ‘Moonbeams & Butterflies’ and ‘Somewhere a Star’, featuring vocalist Chantelle Duncan. All in all it's a delightful genre-stretcher.