Recorded live at the Molde jazz festival in July 2018, this exhilarating take-no-prisoners set finds former Trondheim students Petter Kraft, Oscar Grönberg and Tomas Järmyr (collectively known as left-field jazz-rock trio The MaXx) fronting Trondheim's long-running and formidably flexible orchestra with their own repertoire. With powerful orchestra vocalist Mia Marlen Berg playing a central role, this music sometimes stokes up a rock-opera heat, but the wily countermelodies and detours of the arrangements, and some fiercely full-on blowing from the horn soloists and guitarist Anton Toorell keep the jazz pedal floored. The opening ‘Jazzballaden’ deceptively arrives as a meditative drone, with brass textures gathering slowly around it and delicate birdlike sounds from a recorder above. A slow reeds counterpoint and a discreet backbeat emerge, swelling orchestral power alternates with fragile high-register vocal musings (rhythm-switches between muscle and ethereal delicacy appear throughout this repertoire), before the piece boils up to rugged free-tenor blasting and a blustery trumpet outburst from Kjetil Møster and Thomas Johansson. The MaXx's rock energy is uppermost on the riffy ‘Orgelblå', a brew of brooding guitar sounds, fluid trombone improv, churning drumming, and wailing vocals, and the two long parts of ‘Time Taxi’ take in fast, intricate themes mixing dreamy and banshee vocals and sensuous 1970s-Miles avant-rock grooves, contrasts of vaporous harmonies, driving keys hooks, paint-stripping tenor sax, and a lot more. The crowd noise lets you know how much fun it must have been to be there.