Don Was has maintained Blue Note's identity within the UMG monolith by broadening its range and deepening its roots, welcoming back old hands such as Bobby Hutcherson alongside an enviable current front line including Ambrose Akinmusire, while finding room for Willie Nelson. The Re:imagined albums similarly let contemporary names cover the catalogue, a mutually beneficial process with form ranging from Us3's Herbie-sampling hit ‘Cantaloop (Flip Fantasia)’ (1994) to Makaya McCraven's expansive improvising around vintage tracks, Deciphering the Message (2021).

Like its predecessor, Blue Note Re:imagined II leans on a UK generation whose straightahead education blends with a hip-hop and grime environment; saxophonist-producer Venna, for instance, who brought jazz instrumentation to drill, here turns Donald Byrd's ‘Where Are We Going’ into a Smokey Robinson-style quiet storm of symphonised, summer breeze saxes and vocal harmonies. This is a contemporary R&B album, really, mellowly mining the 1970s more than hard bop's heyday.

Original tracks are sometimes irrelevant, sometimes stimulating launch-pads. Oscar Jerome dips Grant Green's ‘(Why You So) Green With Envy’ in buzzing fields of static, rap and dub, ending with his guitar tone beatifically back in Green's world. The project is justified by Daniel Casimir and Ria Moran's beautiful immersion in Wayne Shorter's 1979 track ‘Lost’. Moran's murmured, mournful vocal lullaby floats unmoored over an acoustic shimmer of piano, sax, drums and Casimir, whose plucked bass solo brims with reflective invention.

Theon Cross's tuba hits Monk's ‘Epistrophy’ with speaker-splattering force, dirty electric guitar whipping through a foundational 1940s Blue Note text, with a sure feel for its underlying, carnivalesque swing. The smoky coalescing of Binker Golding's band around Joe Lovano's ‘Fort Worth’ as his sax ascends over post-Hendrix hard bop; the gospel harmonies of Cherise's take on Norah Jones’ ‘Sunrise’, and Franc Moody's stately homage to Donald Byrd's spiritual ‘Cristo Redentor’, complete with Morricone-esque surf guitar twangs, are other highlights: a reasonable hit-rate on a record rarely settling for classic sounds.