Former Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama student Dan Messore made a memorable impression last year with his debut release, Indigo Kid (also on Babel), a quartet recording featuring Iain Ballamy that demonstrated Messore’s skills both as a composer and can-do leader. His second collection of originals, Talk on the Step, shows the continuing evolution of Messore’s abilities, this time in the context of a quintet. The album certainly has the ‘spring-like and joyous’ feel that Messore was apparently aiming at, in part thanks to a strong world music influence in the writing and the foregrounded presence of Lee Goodall on flute on the likes of opener ‘Mariposa’ and the title track; on ‘Digame’, the opening bop-like theme carried by Steve Waterman’s trumpet is brilliantly disrupted by a sudden burst of latin rhythms with Goodall’s flute fluttering above. ‘A Bit of Light’ is English pastoral, while the album closes out in more unambiguously jazzy fashion with the mellow urgency of the Wayne Shorter-influenced ‘Shortcomings’ and the lovely after-hours musings of ‘Missing’, which have Goodall (now on alto sax) and Waterman weaving lines around one another. It’s an impressively eclectic set that promises exciting things in the future.