Mike and Kate Westbrook's archive is a rich record of six decades of Brit Jazz. Not that the couple and the many bands they've nurtured have always been central to a ‘British tradition’ (if there's ever been such a thing). Their brass band format, for example, grew out of the challenge of finding gigs in the UK: instead Europe offered a more welcoming opportunity for this limber, multi-voiced, multi-instrumental line-up.

The Westbrooks' ever-explorative and cosmopolitan material also chimed with a continental sensibility: here they sashay between Weimar cabaret (‘Kanonensong’), to Martiniquan ‘Creole’ jazz (‘Serpent Maigre’), to a setting of a Paul Eluard poem with a grace a Parisian audience could readily attune to. Mind you, there's a chunk of Chicagoan swing too, filtered through ‘Song of the Rain’ and ‘Windy City Blues’.

Forty years on and several of this band (and songs) remain central to current Westbrook projects. So, it's intriguing to compare the likes of ‘Long John Brown and Little Mary Bell’ then and now. Yes, the voices previously had a greater range and malleability, leading to a bravura vox orgy in Paris. But the Minton/Westbrook dialogue is now scarily primal and ferociously disciplined while that fat bass figure is pumped up with a heavy brass section: you can feel the Devil (like God) too mortally close. So enjoy this memorable and memory making set. For then is now: plus cachange…