The Dowland Project began as a way for tenor John Potter (of the Hilliard Ensemble) and ECM’s Manfred Eicher to ‘re-discover the essence of Renaissance song from the perspective of a modern performer’. Night Sessions represents the third (or fourth, depending on how you count them) release from the ensemble and, despite the moniker, it features no works by old ‘Lachrimae’ Dowland, as the great English composer may or may not have been known to his contemporaries. Instead, the skilful troupe take their inspiration from often minuscule amounts of medieval or slightly later notation and weave fresh ideas resourcefully around their often slender and highly diverse resources: for instance, ‘Theoleptus 22’ is constructed out of a Byzantine chant while ‘Can vei la lauzeta mover’ is a 12th-century love song. Improvisation is at the core of the project, so the presence of a first-rate jazzer like John Surman alongside an early-music expert like Stephen Stubbs shouldn’t surprise: ‘Man in the Moon’ is an engagingly out-there mixture of moodily skittering instrumental invention and declamatory vocal which demonstrates what the different traditions can cook up together. Even if the music isn’t – and doesn’t aim to be – ‘authentic’, there’s plenty of evocative, acoustical period feel courtesy of the St Gerold monastery in the Austrian Alps, which hosted the sessions.