Spike Wells came to jazz on the 1960s bandstand with Bobby Wellins and Tubby Hayes, Eddie Myer out of autodidactic 1990s love, Riley Stone-Lonergan with today’s academic grounding. They find generation-spanning common cause in straightahead hard bop, their model of Sonny Rollins’ chordless trios made current by fluent conviction in jazz’s lingua franca – anyway timeless now every genre and era digitally co-exists, Sidney Bechet and Stormzy awaiting the same swipe or click.

This superior follow-up to the band’s self-titled debut is frontloaded with Stone-Lonergan originals. His tenor is insistent then sinuous on ‘High Noon’, Myer holding the rhythm then diving forward, Wells’ bass-drum deployed as colour, till slow, sultry expiry from Latin heat. The title track is apt on an album of impish staccato as well as breezy swing, Myer’s solo climbing through it at a gentle angle, bass tone warm and round. ‘Bastard Gentlemen’ might be their theme tune, samba informing Wells’ decorative percussion and bomb-dropping drive, and Stone-Lonergan’s melodic filigrees and wild rasps. Monk’s ‘Bright Mississippi’ sees the sax supply the pianist’s slanting notes.

Ballads go deep. Brooding arco bass is met by melancholy tenor on Strayhorn/Ellington’s ‘The Star-Crossed Lovers’, a timeless story in its tune and playing, the wistful sax a lover walking away. Stone-Lonergan’s arrangement of Stephen Foster’s ‘Hard Times Come Again No More’, written in 1854 as if awaiting the American Civil War’s apocalypse, has ‘Auld Lang Syne’’s familiar communality, and chill Celtic knowledge of its theme in the tenor’s tone.

This band are really about loving joy at living inside this music, heard best on Jackie McLean’s ‘Hip Strut’. Stone-Lonergan’s quizzical solo is pushed by Wells’ small percussive beats, Wells’ kit-exploring followed by Myer’s slow dance, as the trio fall into their own intimate world.