Take the title literally. Big Foot is an album of big ideas made by the foot, and other things. Tap dancer Melinda Sullivan provides rhythms through steps that are so ingeniously miked by Pete Min that the uninformed ear would think a drum kit of sorts was deployed. The metallic clicking associated with the tradition of ‘hoofers’ is thus replaced by a wide range of percussive timbres that lends to the music a fresh electro-crunch character. With keyboardist Larry Goldings’ in vague Zawinul mode the songs evoke the more Afro-polyphonic strains of 1970s fusion while the ballads drift into strange blends of 1980s ambient noise and Tortoise-shaped 1990s post-rock.

In fact, the album really comes alive when the players frame a hefty funk backbeat with cartoonish bleeps and bassy belches that uphold a long tradition of instrumental black music predicated on high jinks as well as high skills. Even when session master drummer Steve Gadd is brought into the fold he creates a groove by stomping his soles on a cardboard box. There is absolutely no gimmickry at play though, as the delicious closer ‘Dyad’, with its whizzing, reverberating rhythm and glassy echoes, shows.

Inventive, wittily unorthodox work that takes us to the future from way back in time.