The ‘Young Man with the Horn’ image has been around for some time as a major label marketing ploy and it apparently still has legs if Warner Music’s allegiance to German trumpeter-composer Nils Wülker is anything to go by. Wülker follows in the footsteps of his fellow countryman Till Brönner to an extent and on Continuum his fifth album for Warner and 12th in total, he’s gone full-blown orchestral, seemingly a rite of passage in a lounge-jazz trumpeter’s career trajectory. It’s a collaboration with Munich’s Radio Orchestra but it’s not entirely the predictable swooning strings accompaniment you might think: in other words it’s not just scenery for Wülker’s slinky melancholic trumpet to woo the kind of ladies and gents who didn’t know they liked jazz until they heard Nils. His previous release, the electronic-influenced Go, contained four of the themes performed here and arrangements of them for the NDR Radiophilharmonie in 2020 and then Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra under EST Symphony orchestra director Hans Ek have helped to give shape to the orchestral versions here. Elsewhere the Massive Attack founder/film composer Craig Armstrong creates a persuasive cinematic soundtrack sheen with his strings writing for the ballad ‘Munich Afternoon’ and ‘Landscape’, the latter owing something to mid-1990s trip-hop. Other originals such as ‘Hybrid Balance’ and ‘Retrace Your Steps’ conjure up derivative widescreen sounds but with a heavier up-tempo groove supporting Wülker’s sweet melodically-driven trumpet. It’s instantly forgettable all the same.