Within six months of releasing Mark Lockheart's painterly orchestral project Days on Earth, Edition Records now presents the Loose Tubes and Polar Bear saxophonist/composer improvising on Anglican hymns in a duo with Roger Sayer, the organist of London's acoustically haunting Temple Church. Like John Surman, Lockheart is an English saxophonist with the country's church music deep in his psyche, and this venture was the idea of crossover composer/arranger John Ashton Thomas, who was recording with Sayer at Temple in 2016. Thomas invited Lockheart to join on three pieces, and the following year reconvened the partnership to hitch classics from Thomas Tallis and Henry Purcell and others to his own contemporary themes, the latter skilfully crafted like a kind of hymnal movie-music. On the tender, softly piping title-track by 17th century organist John Blow, Lockheart gracefully sustains its discreet triplet bounce in his improvisation, and Sayer's ghostly organ ostinato swirls around murmuring soprano sax repeat-notes and purring runs as the famous tradition theme of ‘In Dulci Jubilo’ accelerates from meditation to a gentle churn. Tallis' imperious ‘Third Tune for Archbishop Parker's Psalter’ gets a minimalism-driven organ part and a more rugged appearance for the tenor sax, while on Purcell's ‘Dido's Lament’ Lockheart mostly leaves the patiently despairing theme respectfully alone. The shapely lyricism and pastel-hued sonic palette of this music makes it a worthy shelf-companion to Jan Garbarek's Officium, or Surman's A Biography of the Rev. Absalom Dawe, though it's a little more dynamically underpowered and improvisationally cautious than such stablemates as those.