Rare instrument alert! On his new album, Jeremy Udden gives a leading role to the Lyricon, an early 1970s electronic wind instrument played like a saxophone. Udden has been experimenting with it for some time – adding pedals and looping devices along the way – but has never given it such prominence in a recorded context. Its presence gives the collection a nostalgic twang – a hint of Steely Dan, a touch of Weather Report – but also a curiously contemporary boldness when it’s combined with such relaxed ease with the other instruments present here.

Udden’s Lyricon playing first steps into the spotlight on track two, the bluesy ‘1971’, which also gives a fired-up role to Ben Monder’s gutsy, wandering electric guitar work. The two instruments lead the way on ‘Car Radio’, before Jorge Roeder’s acoustic bass comes to the fore, underpinned by Ziv Ravitz’s expert drum work.

There’s a conceptual thread pulling the collection together too: Udden’s daughter’s discovery of dandelions, or ‘Wishing Flowers’, on her way home from school with her father in urban Brooklyn. The set closes with a hypnotically unstitched version of Mazzy Star’s ‘Fade Into You’, given a makeover à la Paul Bley – that is, played as though the performers had never heard it before, which came naturally to three-quarters of the players, since it was genuinely new to them. A fine collection.