Despite run-outs with luminaries like Lage and Halvorson, Douglas isn’t best known for collaborating with guitarists, and certainly none has contributed so much to the mood and structures of a Douglas release as Bhatia does here.

Bhatia and Chang are long-time chums from the rock band Son Lux and they bring a roar and rawness to Gifts not common to Douglas’ works. Where the trumpeter’s last release, Marches, was a blatant call to on street protest, Gifts is a more inward, emotionally complex album. Douglas muses on the gift of music and the musical tradition that give us support and inspiration in what can appear a chaotic and ugly world.

And to this end the album’s compassionate but emotional soul is a four-song sequence of Billy Strayhorn songs. ‘Take the A Train’ is a stunning re-working, with an echo of Zeppelin’s ‘Kashmir’ in Bhatia’s chordings. Lewis’ tenor is absent from the other 3 songs, but if ‘Rain Check’ is nakedly danceable, it all changes, inevitably, with ‘Blood Count’. It begins admirably straight-ahead, but Bhatia’s textures and distorted stabs heave Douglas aside until the maelstrom is resolved (or flatlines?) with one sustained note from the returning horn.

It’s fascinating to compare Ian Shaw’s treatment of similar material on An Adventurous Dream reviewed elsewhere in these august pages. Another example of how great material just keeps giving, whoever the artist is, whatever the style they choose to play in. Which is largely Douglas’ point.