The concept looks inviting enough on paper. Re-imaginings of compositions by Jelly Roll Morton, Bennie Moten, Fats Waller and the standard ‘China Boy’, a tune much beloved of 1930s swing musicians, alternate with extended free improvisations. Ellery Eskelin tells us that his group wanted to investigate ways in which “the same tones can elicit very different sensations” but their album, in the actual listening, quickly deals up the law of diminishing returns. The historical filter through which Sun Ra and the ICP Orchestra (and more recently Moppa Elliott's group Mostly Other People Do the Killing and Chris Batchelor's quartet Pigfoot) distil the ragged energies and pungent harmonies of 1920s jazz and 1930s swing is also a two-way mirror: free improvisation re-contextualises, scars even, the familiar classic jazz surface and musical material becomes liberated from musical style. Not here though. After the first in a sequence of schooled, ambling free improvisations, Jelly Roll Morton's ‘Shreveport Stomp’ is dropped inside inverted commas, Eskelin's exaggerated vibrato and Griener's hokum splash cymbal obliging the piece to wear a postmodern smirk. Christian Weber raises the game in ‘Moten Swing’ with some harmonic ambiguities that don't ultimately lead anywhere, while ‘Ain't Misbehavin’’ is twee and really needs to misbehave more. Disappointing stuff.