“The thing about this record is, I wanted it to be jazzier,” says Ed Palermo of his new disc, A Lousy Day in Harlem, which features tunes by Ellington, Monk and Trane in addition to a slew of originals. Palermo leads one of the best big bands in contemporary music so you would think that jazz – authentic jazz, jazzer's jazz, shall we say – would be his stock-in-trade. But no: more typical of his recorded output is last year's The Adventures of Zodd Zundgren, a mash-up of the catalogues of Frank Zappa (a constant reference point for Palermo) and Todd Rundgren. Both albums are great examples of the arranger's art, united if not by their compositional sources then by their penchant for humour. Zodd Zundgren is more gag-filled – Zappa liked a musical laugh, so that goes without saying, really – but there's wit and pathos in the cover image to A Lousy Day, which has Palermo sitting alone in front of the very same brownstone apartment building on East 126th Street in New York where Art Kane assembled 57 musicians on 12 August 1958 for his famous image A Great Day in Harlem. Happily, Palermo's regular band turned up to accompany him on the musical contents within, and it's hard not to warm to the tap-dance solo on ‘The One with the Balloon’.