David Forman is a remarkable autodidact, now in his nineties, who for five decades was a full-time Brighton dentist and a sophisticated amateur jazz composer on the side, and then a live-jazz and travel photographer with a cannily perceptive eye. Like A Rainbow features 11 originals written over that full-on lifetime, performed by various subgroups of a 14-strong cast of A-list jazz players, and very imaginatively arranged by the formidable Sussex pianist/composer Mark Edwards. Postwar swing and bebop, Dave Brubeck, the MJQ, and hit West End musicals have gone into Forman's sound - but the performers here bring a generous contemporary dynamism to recreating it.

The catchily slow-burning ‘Chorisma’ is given a Michael Breckerish muscle through the tenor sax of Paul Booth and a gleaming vibraphone diversion from Joe Locke. Mark Edwards subtly expands a keyboard trio's soundscape with bassist Chris Laurence and drummer Darren Beckett on the whimsically graceful ‘Krysalis’; the title track is a lovely ballad sung by the Cullum/Bublé-like Sam Cox (the lyrics are by fine Brighton singer Imogen Ryall), while Edwards, tenorist Andy Panayi and trombonist Mark Nightingale rise up through the Latin shuffle of ‘I Can Be Me’, and Mike Walker's incomparable guitar rips through the bluesy ‘Jump The Q’.

A bonus in this heartfelt project is the full-colour 76-page booklet displaying Forman's truly stirring landscape, social, and live-jazz photography, captured all over the world. Like A Rainbow is, as Mark Edwards puts it in the liner notes, ‘an extraordinary adventure of music and friendship’. Forman's own circle of friends and admirers may well be its primary audience, but the playing and the imagery here have an affecting universal appeal.