Having followed the 2015 release of grooving nu-jazz quartet Ruby Rushton's debut Two For Joy with the P-funk/house dance-jazz synthesis of 2016's On Flute and the studied Indo-jazz fusion of 2019's Raga From Lahore, where would saxophonist/producer Ed ‘Tenderlonious’ Cawthorne go next?

Perhaps surprisingly, he has chosen the late 1960s and early 70s roots of spiritual jazz and a selection of well-chosen tunes from that period and given them a respectful revival in a classic saxophone quartet line-up.

It's a brave excursion, given that the tunes inevitably evoke originators like Wayne Shorter, Clifford Jordan and Larry Willis. They, in turn, were paying tribute to the likes of John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy and so, rightly, Cawthorne treads softly on such hallowed ground. Willis’ Dolphy-memorialising elegy ‘Poor Eric’ begins almost over-respectfully before Hamish Balfour's piano and Tim Carnegie's drumming lift it into a more celebratory swing that allows the saxophonist to take a more impassioned flight.

Inevitably in this quartet line-up Balfour gets to do much of the heavy lifting, his flourishing opening to Stanley Cowell's ‘Maimoun’ developing into a neat undertow that echoes and embellishes the saxophone theme. That empathetic duet, underpinned with briskly grooving bass from Pete Martin, springboards the piano towards an excellent solo worthy of Cowell himself.

It seems that fatherhood has given Cawthorne a renewed sense of heritage – the album cover show's him playing to a small child, there's a fulsome flute rendition of Wayne Shorter's ‘Infant Eyes’ and, of course, Duke Pearson's ‘You Know I Care’. It's another restrained flute feature emphasising the emotive tune in a classic Blue Note context and it leaves you with a sense of Tenderlonious as a contemporary musician paying his dues to those influences that have mattered the most to him.