You've got to admire the self-confidence of musicians who, after a single rehearsal, go into the studio and lay all the tracks down live. But that’s exactly what drummer Matt Slocum has done on this, his seventh album as leader, which consists of five original tunes and three lesser-known standards.

The least famous of the three players here, despite his output to date, Slocum studied with the great Peter Erskine. His style at the kit is measured, sympathetic and lacking in bombast.

We know by now what’s required in order to appreciate a band with no harmony instrument, namely an ear for the implied harmony. Of course, it also helps to have sidemen (if you can call them that) of the calibre of Smith and Grenadier, whose clarity of thought and execution make the whole thing easy to follow. This is nowhere truer than on Vernon Duke’s ‘What is There to Say?’ - a ballad popular in the 1950s but not heard much since - and the Gordon Jenkins midtempo swinger ‘This Is All I Ask’.

The true value of this album is the way its three protagonists balance each other out. There is, in other words, no dominant voice, simply a desire to make it a harmonious whole by leaving space for everyone to perform their allotted role. Lion Dance is a quietly satisfying album which works beautifully as a collection of songs, and sounds as great as one might hope, given the circumstances of its recording (it was recorded and mixed live to two-track analogue tape at Sear Sound, New York). No grandstanding, no excesses of any kind, simply timeless musical quality.