Glasgow-born double-bassist Calum Gourlay has been a familiar UK jazz presence for almost two decades – way back as a teenager in Tommy Smith’s talent-spotting Youth Jazz Orchestra in Scotland, to anchoring Kit Downes’ trio following his Royal Academy of Music years, and lately running his own monthly big-band residency at London’s Vortex. Though this is a two-horn quartet set, Gourlay’s refined orchestral thinking and elegant polyphonic writing make the music of his small band sound almost like an ingenious precis of his big one – to which end, the Cool School poise of tenor saxophonist Helena Kay, the garrulous fluency of trombonist Kieran McLeod, and drummer James Maddren’s alertness as both a textural and a groovemaking player all play indispensable roles. ‘Be Minor’, a tersely hard-boppish swinger with a busy bass vamp, opens the album – and sets up its signature tension between gracefully-crafted ensemble music and free-floating dialogues between the horns. The deep-toned, slinky ’Blue Fugates’ occasionally veers close to a trad-jazzy bounce, Kay glimpses the late Warne Marsh on the looping ‘New Ears’, the wintry ‘Solstice’ has slow harmony movements reminiscent of Birth of the Cool, and Scottish folk-harmonies drift in and out of the lugubriously polyphonic ‘Ro’ and the jiggy ‘Trinity’. Gourlay’s is music of craft and quirky character, and it grows on you.