The title suggests that Phil Woods’ first extended composition, a five-movement jazz suite, might owe something to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. And indeed it does. But the connection is not thematic, apart from a couple of ‘blink and you’ve missed it’ references in the final ‘Presto’ movement. Instead, Woods took the idea of how the ballet’s constituent parts related to one another. He had a stack of 78s of the Rite that he played on an old-fashioned drop-down gramophone, thus hearing it out of sequence, with sides one, three, five and so on dropping onto the turntable, and missing out the flipsides. He realised that the suite had ‘a sense of cyclic motion, starting anywhere and always going round’, and decided to try composing a suite from scratch that had a similar sense of movement uniting a fairly open framework.

The end result is clever, because it takes more than one listen to appreciate how the motifs set out in the prelude and first movement are cunningly reintroduced later, as are brief quotations from some of Woods’ earlier compositions, and a recurring ballad theme. The reason this isn’t immediately apparent is the tightness of the ensemble, and the whole band’s brilliantly accomplished solos that straddle the boundaries between mainstream and bebop.

Benny Bailey sheds the bop style he’d used in the Gillespie big band for a shining subtle reading of the ‘Ballad’, which is then masterfully built on by Woods. Curtis Fuller’s muted solo on the ‘Waltz’ section looks back to earlier trombonists such as Tricky Sam Nanton, and Tommy Flanagan’s ever-perfect accompaniment brings out some outstanding playing from Woods in the blues section of the ‘Scherzo’ movement.

There’s high quality blowing all round, and the album benefits from the studio direction of Quincy Jones, in whose big band the majority of the musicians had worked in the previous couple of years.