The news recently broke that drummer Billy Hart and alto saxist Donald Harrison - staple members of now 14 year-old all-star neo-hard bop septet The Cookers - are due to join the pantheon of jazz legends honoured by America's National Endowment For The Arts as 2022 Jazz Masters. It's not only a fitting tribute to Hart and Harrison – skilled and sagacious jazz originals for decades – but a pointer to what marks out the band's ability to keep referencing profound African-American traditions whilst sounding dynamically contemporary.

Look Out! is their first album in five years, cut on vintage kit at the revamped Van Gelder Studios, but sounding like a live recording, enhanced by that signature quality that liner-note writer (and Jazzwise contributor) Kevin Le Gendre rightly calls an 'orchestral richness… that will consistently blur the line between small group and big band'.

The tracks are long-time favourites by the band members, ranging from classically tricksy hard bop hooks juggling stop-time teases and double-tempo torrents, long-note entreaties that sound like soul songs, smoky ballads, and obliquely Latin-inflected swingers. Billy Harper's 'Somalia' (also released as a single) cranks up a stately opening motif and sonorous vocal chant into one of several blazing outbursts from the composer's tenor sax. Pianist George Cables' 'The Mystery of Monifa Brown' and bassist Cecil McBee's 'Cat's Out The Bag' are canny masterclasses in squeezing labyrinthine lines into tight spaces, Cables' 'Travelling Lady' has a Corea-like Latin spring in its step. Everybody solos eloquently and often, and nobody would guess the average age of the membership - 74 - from the sparkling sound of this fine set.