“Go big or go home”, the popular saying counsels. Composer-arranger Giles Thornton, recording his crowdfunded debut while still a student at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, boldly chose the former course: Be In Today features almost 30 musicians and boasts influences from Maria Schneider and Vince Mendoza through to Joni Mitchell. It's a kind of theory of everything but held together by the intimate feeling that informs the scaled-up experimentalism and the musical surprises that stud the big instrumentation. It's also big-band music of a delightfully big-hearted kind. The first five numbers comprise a suite: ‘Ballad Of The Unnoticed’ and its study of outsiderdom features a nicely unexpected sax-and-synth passage; ‘Over The Edge’ expressionistically depicts an emotional collapse, with the reeds and guitar parping out a harsh, angular anguish, swiftly followed by ‘Reflections’, a come-down piano piece for four hands. Liane Carroll, with whom Thornton worked on the album launch for her The Right to Love, makes a guest appearance on the final track, a cover of Joni Mitchell's ‘A Case Of You’.