Manchester's Mike Walker, one of the most exciting and imaginative jazz-to-fusion guitarists in Europe, has been thrilling audiences and captivating bandleaders (from Mike Gibbs to George Russell) since the 1980s. But admirers of his post-bop spontaneity and rugged blues-power might be surprised at first by a very personal venture shaped by classical music as much as by jazz – originally composed by the guitarist in 2008 for a Manchester Jazz Festival performance, and recorded with crowdfunding support in 2015, for the 22-piece Psappha strings orchestra, and jazz partners including pianist Les Chisnall, and the UK/US Impossible Gentlemen quartet. Walker chose the theme of ropes as a metaphor for the bonds of families and loved ones, deliverance from cliff-faces or ocean storms, and the instruments of imprisonment and servitude. But if his intentions are serious, the music isn't melancholy or dark. A slow opening meditation for piano, cello and Iain Dixon's silver-toned clarinet, introduces a theme Walker conceived as a slow sea-shanty. Soft guitar chords join swaying strings harmonies on ‘Ropes Movement 1’, and the heat gently builds with Walker's sleek improv lines over a ticking groove following Dixon's almost-boppish soprano sax on ‘Movement 2’. Dixon's clarinet peals like a chorister's voice on the poignant ‘Kiss The Hills For Me Just Once’, Gwilym Simcock twists effortlessly through the tight chording of ‘Devon Bean’, ‘Wallenda's Last Stand’ is a delectable latin sway, ‘Madhouse And The Whole Thing There’ brings a captivating Walker solo of slow slurs and sensual glides. This is not Mike Walker as he's widely known, but Ropes is a heartfelt venture full of secrets that reveal themselves with time.