“For any musician growing up in or around London, especially if you’ve grown up loving great improvisation, as I did,” says Nitin Sawhney in relation to this disc, recorded live in Soho across three nights in March 2016, “Ronnie Scott’s is the most iconic club to play – hands down.” Ronnie’s isn’t perhaps the most obvious venue for Sawhney, not least because he’s used to playing to much larger audiences – but, there again, what is an ‘obvious’ venue for a musician whose work so effortlessly blends flamenco, blues and raga? For these dates, the multi-instrumentalist took to the stage with a pared-down supporting band to offer a reimagining of material drawn from 1999’s Mercury Music Prize-nominated Beyond Skin, 2001’s Prophesy and his most recent release, 2015’s Dystopian Dream. The mastery and melding of different styles – funk, tabla breakbeats, the aforementioned raga, blues and flamenco – is dazzling, and expertly captured on this Gearbox recording. My favourite moment has Sawhney introducing “another singalong track” and (briefly) teaching the audience to count to five in Hindi before launching into the breathless, breakneck introduction to ‘The Conference’, a virtuoso workout for tabla player and vocalist Aref Durvesh.