Funny lark, this reviewing gig: sometimes an album just catches you right, sneaks in between the cracks of your ignorance and your paltry prejudice and leaves you purring.

Blue Has a Range is one such: no grand ambition, no radical revisioning. Just gorgeous music, sumptuously played by a group who ease the best from each other with a nary a showboating note. But as Cardenas’ pedigree includes playing with Paul Motian, Steve Swallow and Charlie Haden who would expect anything less.

Cardenas likewise has years of mileage with his compadres here, so whether it's on the spry blues lope of ‘Blue Language’, or the high romance of ‘Fern's Guitar’ (a rich toned vintage Martin as it happens) the band are seamlessly in synch. The Coltrane edged ‘Highline’ is something of an anomaly as most of the songs rarely stray from a blues context. But it's ‘Siquidjor’ that is the emotional heart of Blue Has a Range: Cowherd's ecstatic yet restrained keys sit alongside Cardenas’ chordings while Blade's rich panoply of cymbal work is a filigree of wonder. Bit over the top? Too right: and rightly so.