When the Baker trio launches into ‘There Will Never Be Another You’ at the start of this beautifully-produced set from Elemental, Michel Graillier’s muscular piano introduction promises a lot. And then Baker enters, for a searingly out-of-tune vocal, his enunciation sounding as if he has a clothes peg on his nose, followed by several choruses of vacuous falsetto scat. It takes three minutes (of a 12-minute track) before his trumpet comes in, and suddenly we’re hearing flashes of the same consummate player who was so outstanding on the Live In London albums on Ubuntu, recorded just 10 weeks earlier.

As on the London sessions, his solos tend towards the over-long, but once he has the horn to his lips there’s plenty of invention and interest, his ideas prompted by Graillier, just as they had been by John Horler in London. There are parallels of repertoire here too, for example ‘Stella by Starlight’ and ‘Just Friends’. The latter doesn’t stand up to the London recording, where after a couple of joking recitations of the title, the trumpet comes in swiftly and strongly, with Tony Mann’s drums urging Baker on. By contrast the French recording with the weaker drum-less rhythm section, and Riccardo Del Fra providing none of the lower end punch that Jim Richardson brought to the London gigs, drifts off into yet more rambling vocals, and the trumpet finally sidles in after six rather uninspiring minutes. The average duration of a number hovers around the 15-minute mark (though ‘Arbor Way’ clocks in at 18’55”). So even on a piece like ‘Easy Living’ that has a sensitive opening trumpet solo, the abiding impression is that less is more, and that the days when Baker packed what he had to say into a three minute song served his talent more effctively. If you only want one example of this period of Baker, Live In London Vol. 2 does a better job by far, despite Elemental’s high production standards and well-researched booklet.