These days it’s not unusual for bands to keep going for half a century – the Rolling Stones have survived 62 years and they haven’t always taken particularly good care of themselves.

But Chris Sansom’s group Perfect Stranger remains an outlier nonetheless in that they're marking their semi-centenary by releasing a debut album. For the smartly titled Unfinished Business, bassist and composer Sansom has returned to a project first envisioned in 1974, when he was at university and working under the influence of jazz-rock – Frank Zappa and Yes are both namechecked in the press materials.

A talented group of young jazz musicians, including Chris Biscoe, Dick Pearce and Paul Nieman, who would go on to become significant figures on the jazz scene, gathered originally to perform the music, but Perfect Stranger – characterised by tricky and shifting time signatures – proved hard to realise and was shelved.

Until now, that is: Sansom has assembled another stellar set of young jazz musicians to revive the music, which is jazz but also attracts the descriptors fusion, prog and third stream. The album begins with ‘Life & Times (of a Perfect Stranger)’, a four-movement piece that derives its structure – loosely – from a classical symphony. It’s by turns swinging and refulgent, slow and stately, and souped-up and thrill-seeking. ‘Lugubrious Boots’ is likewise full of great solo spots, and then ‘Ludwig’s Van’ closes things out, running the gamut stylistically, but including shuffle, reggae, bebop and funk. Let’s hope we don’t have to wait another 50 years for the follow-up…