To criticise music as life-affirming as this seems rather churlish, so it is with a heavy heart that I write this review. Over the past six decades, the great saxophonist-composer Trevor Watts has been a true force of nature on the UK and international jazz scenes, lending his compositional skills and consummate sax tones to a huge variety of projects, from the influential avant-garde Spontaneous Music Ensemble (which he co-founded), through to more mainstream projects.

This recording, liberated from Watts’ personal archive, sees his Drum Orchestra performing in front of an audience at the 1994 Karlsruhe Festival in Germany. This same band recorded an album for ECM (A Wider Embrace, 1994) which is in some ways more successful, partly because the recording quality on the ECM disc is so much better than the sound presented here, and because the studio imposed discipline.

The performances (particularly Watts’) and the opener ‘Opening Gambit’ are great, but the dryness of the recording lets the album down. This would have been a wonderful concert to have been at, but on this CD a lot of the infectiousness of the long African-accented grooves is just not there. But these are perhaps minor quibbles. Don’t listen to me – let your own ears (and feet) decide.