Beats & Pieces' director Ben Cottrell is a Manc indie-band singer trapped in a big-band jazz leader's body. Or is it the other way round? In any case, the title Ten of their third CD points to the Manchester-based band's longevity; they celebrate a decade together with a ‘live’ album recorded at the Royal Northern College of Music. Appropriately it was where Cottrell conceived the band, originally gathering 13 fellow students to workshop some of his unusual self-penned big-band charts. Three years later they started to make some headway internationally as recipients of the prestigious Burghausen European Young Jazz Artists award that provided funding for their debut album Big Ideas released in 2012. The repertoire here is a greatest hits collection from that album and 2015's All In, plus a few new tunes that were previewed in a New Year's residence at Ronnie Scott's that kicked off this year's birthday celebrations. Beats & Pieces have a rawer edge than your typical ‘mainstream’ big band, with fat-toned, effusive brass and lyrical horn ensemble charts that draw from film noir and Mingus/Gil informed modernism, through to more free-form, contrapuntal ensemble traditions. But the searing guitar riffs and driving rock grooves, that would sound pretty mediocre played separately from the whole, underpin the compositions, eschewing formal big-band methodologies. There's a hunger and intensity to the solos and the personnel's execution of Cottrell's arrangements that attests to their shared conviction over the past decade.