Seeing leader Tsiganov's name gave me a momentary qualm. He had added vapid synthesiser washes to the otherwise stirring hard bop of trumpeter Eddie Allen's Push album recently and I feared a repetition of such unhelpful contributions. No such pitfalls here, for the 47-year old Russian pianist had eschewed the synthesiser and concentrated instead on piano, assembling a play-list of testing pieces, using his own arrangements and players who he knew would successfully tackle the varied metric challenges he had posed. Tsiganov himself has the kind of hard-edged piano style that speaks of his Hancock-ian inclinations, dynamic, probing and certainly capable of building momentum. The remaining members of the group are boon companions, whether in small combos or in the rumbustious ranks of the Mingus Big Band and know perfectly well what they have to do. The standards selected by Tsiganov range from Porter's ‘Get Out of Town’, here given a strong yet engaging seeing-to, ahead of Kern's ‘The Song Is You’, taken as a trio recital with Edwards breaking up the time. Elsewhere, Wayne Shorter, John Coltrane, Charlie Parker (his ‘Ah-Leu-Cha’ is a kind of collective jam), and Steve Wonder provide the melodic material, the ever-reliable Sipiagin, fat-sounding but never routine, and Blake, a player of exceptional fluidity, clearly relishing the chance to exert their magic on these time-honoured compositions. I especially liked their take on Wes Montgomery's ‘Four on Six’ highlighting Kozlov's nifty vamp and Sipiagin's vibrant, flying solo. Russia three, North America two: an interesting score-line.