Both ad hoc band and composers’ showcase, communal resource and musical achievement, Interchange typifies Issie Barratt’s work as educator, activist and artist. In the latter role, she has focused on large ensembles in a way rare for British female jazz musicians, eight of whom are offered the format’s compositional opportunities here. Though not always the music’s freest zone, with Ellington’s heritage and classically minded conservatoires perhaps maintaining its aspirational status, the individuals thus nurtured make their own case. Interchange are mostly a 10-piece, with Karen Street’s accordion largely substituting for piano to ensure gig practicality. Street’s ‘Still Here’ typifies an often soothing, restorative response to common themes of sickness and violent tumult. Cassie Kinoshi, already a large-group, long-form veteran with her SEED Ensemble, gives a harsher edge of dark, brassy funk to ‘Caliban’, as Chelsea Carmichael’s tenor capers like Shakespeare’s ambiguous slave-monster. Shirley Smart’s ‘Palmyra’ blows sandstorm cymbal washes and jostling percussion through a swirling celebration of life in Middle Eastern cities, before chittering discord signals its decimation. Barratt’s own ‘Samla Korna Med Kulning’ gives choral majesty to Nordic female herders’ unique songs. Most memorably, Carol Jarvis’s ‘Hope’ uses Jessica Radcliffe’s vocodered voice to urge a long cancer struggle towards the light, in an elegy suggesting ward isolation and sacred contemplation. A sea-change washing away the necessity (if not the pleasure) of gender focus is hopefully brewing in the new generation of striking individuals such as Nubya Garcia, Laura Jurd (a former Barratt student present throughout Donna’s Secret), Kinoshi and Shirley Tetteh. In the meantime, these are valuable voices.