Bolton-born saxophonist Phil Meadows, currently the lead alto in NYJO, graduated from Trinity Laban only last year. Versatile and well-educated, he is perhaps typical of the latest batch of jazz graduates in that he can skim the surface of a diverse range of idiomatic jazz languages, yet sound adept at all of them. That goes for his associates on this his debut CD as well, two of them founder members of The Chaos Collective, pianist Elliot Galvin and a self-contained young trumpeter Laura Jurd, who burst onto the scene with an outstanding debut Landing Ground released late last year. Instead of your typical jazz solos based around a theme, Meadows’ compositions develop in an episodic nature, the music taking unexpected idiomatic turns, before building to a climax. The sense of shape and structure tends to remain intact though. Meadows plays some bracing, assertive solos and there are clues as to his and the band’s eclectic influences: his probing Wayne Shorter-like phrasing on soprano sax on the whirly folky-ish ‘Moving On’; a more angular and New York-ish avant-funky alto on ‘Runner’, while Elliot Galvin’s Rhodes and Jurd’s imaginatively penetrating phrases on trumpet suggest some aspects of Miles’ electric period. The pianist is inventively Liam Noble-like on the opener ‘Fin’, while a crashing free improv moment or two disrupts the lyrical flow of a wistful theme of the kind that drummer Seb Rochford might have written for Polar Bear. The Middle Eastern-ish ‘The Dragon of George’ sounds like Gilad Atzmon arranged by Vijay Iyer and the softly romantic ‘Captain Kirk’ theme is reminiscent of Pat Metheny. All in all Meadows has made quite an entrance for a new kid on the block.