Ah, now here's a treat. Lockheart's love affair with Ellington goes back to his childhood, but In Anticipation is no exercise in nostalgia. Instead, he's taken classic Ellingtonia, ‘Caravan’, ‘Satin Doll’, ‘Creole Love Call’, and re-imagined them for his own sound world and, crucially, for that of his band. He's gone for an Ellington vibe rather than trying to replicate the music, so he's written very much for the idiosyncratic qualities of his soul mates, much as Ellington wrote with Hodges or Gonsalves in mind. So Noble's piano is to the fore, mixing the lyric (a gorgeous ‘Come Sunday’) with the questing – a repeated minimalist riff is more Steve Reich's ‘Different Trains’ than it is ‘Take The ‘A’ Train'. But what's also splendidly Ellington is Lockheart's confidence to counterpoint precisely jewelled detail against long, relaxed grooves: a super-slow-mo ‘Creole Love Call’ morphs into a bass-driven blues grunt that propels Lockheart into such sweet thunder, while his own ‘Beautiful Man’ makes time stand still. Throughout the set there's a chamber-like, intimate feel (check out the intro to ‘Mood Indigo’) which suits a shimmering ‘Azure’ and the closing ‘Indian Summer’ (Noble again luscious, while the violin holds a single note, Radiohead-style). And of course humour's never far away; Lockheart's own ‘Uptown’ sounds more like Ellington than Ellington, with the Cotton Club now twisted into a Weill-like cabaret groove. Other Loose Tubers may have leapt quicker from the traps on their composing careers, but Lockheart's long run from the rear is now bearing fruit to savour.