There’s a reason that traditional jazz bands abandoned the tuba in the late 1930s, which is that it constipates the rhythm section, holding it back from swinging freely. Leviathans like Lu Watters’ Yerba Buena Jazz Band deliberately sought the ploddy sound of the earliest jazz, but by and large the most effective ensembles in the genre have been tuba-free. Yet Tuba Skinny, known for their al fresco playing in New Orleans and at various festivals around the world, embrace the earlier sound, and as if to rub in the point decorate their rhythm section with washboard and a plethora of guitars and banjos.

Hearing the woefully out-of- tune string playing on ‘Chalmette Sunsets’ here, maybe that intonation is intentional too. The minute they go for string bass and kit drums on Robin Rapuzzi’s ‘Mighty Anchor’ the whole band loosens up and it’s only the insipid, and occasionally stilted, clarinet playing of Craig Flory that mars the track. All through the album there’s the sense that they’re skating over the surface and not playing the music with real conviction. This is a shame because, as their many fans around the world know, the band does include some fine players, not least leader-cornetist Shaye Cohn whose compositions in this all-original set stand out for being more harmonically and structurally adventurous than the majority of the others. There are some occasional fine solo moments, but overall the effect of the album is stodgy rather than really swinging, and so the whole is very much less than the promise of the sum of its parts.