British bassist-composer le Fleming and his Romantic Funk Band’s 2020 release The Unfamiliar was an unexpectedly fresh and pulsating work, taking for its inspiration a mix of Miles Davis’ late 1960s pre-plugged-in and 1980s synth-y fusion, Weather Report and other electric funk-jazz influences.

Le Fleming recently returned to dear old Blighty and as a consequence, this is a new British incarnation of his Romantic Funk band continuing with the work of his previous couple of albums yet, inevitably perhaps, with a perceptible shift in the group sound. Wandering Talk is less airy texturally than its predecessor, with a dreamier sonic world.

Charmingly so on ‘Garden Shearing Blues’ with pianist Tom Cawley’s delicately eerie block chords recalling the late great George Shearing and le Fleming’s acoustic walking bass and James Maddren’s kit work really cookin’ throughout. Indeed, le Fleming’s bass playing and compositions are consistently top-notch on this album, and trumpeter Philip Dizack, the only surviving member of the previous New York-based line-up, is outstanding when called upon.

His playing is direct yet nuanced, and has a sustained singing quality, recalling the Bix tone in Miles’ playing. On ‘Tragic Magic’ he weaves a compelling theme over Tom Cawley’s Zawinul-ish astral synth pads. ‘Repose’, with its languorous Wayne Shorter-like theme anticipates their take on ‘Plaza Real’, a ballad written by Shorter from his time in Weather Report, and is just fine played pretty straight but with an epic climax that rings with passion.

The title track is a brief coda featuring a bona fide stadium pop superstar in Coldplay vocalist Chris Martin who’s Le Fleming’s old school chum. Against type however, Martin delivers a plain yet soothingly affecting vocal, reciting a few verses of Rumi’s Sufi-inspired poetry.