More big sounds and ambition from up north, this time by Leeds-based drummer-composer Tommy Evans' Contemporary Jazz Composition BASCA award-winning The Green Seagull (the original commission was for Marsden Jazz Festival). A former jazz student at the Leeds College of Music, Evans is also a founder member of the city's hep Submotion Orchestra and fans of the band's jazzy interpretation of dubstep would probably take a big interest in the second CD's remixes of the suite by such electronic/underground dance acts as Phaelah and Jack Sparrow. CD1 though is the original suite performed by a young acoustic 13-piece North of England orchestra that includes an older helping hand in fellow ex-Leeds College bassist Dave Kane. Jami Smith's ‘empty ballroom’ piano theme becomes a lonesome jazz ballad on ‘Early Doors’; ‘Per Mare Per Terram’ provides a variation on the previous theme in the shape of a Brechtian marching brass band groove with sometime electronically treated choral-like backing vocals. It's just a small part of an expansive musical structure that is more reminiscent of the Matthew Herbert Big Band than Manchester's Beats and Pieces. Evans wrote the suite inspired by his uncle, a priest who looked to build bridges between the church and other faiths as well as the vulnerable in society. This is heard in a direct way on the Robert Wyatt-ish ‘Cardboard box’, a song that hits home with its poignant message on the theme of homelessness, and through the choral-like poppy vocal and baroque brass passages lends the suite a pastoral melancholy. However Evans also sets the scene for his band members to improvise, which can be on the side of the meditatively lyrical through to a stormy avant jazz atmosphere. The broad nature of Evans' work might sound like he's spreading himself too thinly but the strength and immediacy of the themes bind it all together brilliantly.