Philadelphia’s Captain Black Big Band are a jubilantly risk-embracing collective formed from the city’s sharpest jazz players – organised (though pretty loosely) by pianist Orrin Evans, better known to the wider world as Ethan Iverson’s replacement in The Bad Plus. For their third album, Evans has joined 2016 live cuts from two local venues (SOUTH Kitchen & Jazz Parlor, and Chris’ Jazz Cafe, where the outfit formed in 2009), deploying a shaved-down 13-piece line-up on nine homegrown tracks. Trombonist David Gibson’s barging, handclap-spurred ‘The Scythe’ is a contemporary big-band chase powered by a racing bass pulse and cymbal hiss, sparking hurtling solos from rugged tenorist Troy Roberts and bright-toned trumpeter Josh Lawrence. The zigzagging unaccompanied tenor-bop intro to ‘Question’ turns into a collective melee of dissonant chord-shouts, hell-for-leather swing and wild sax multiphonics, and the ensemble’s appetite for tempo switches is evident on Evans’ staccato, piano-prefaced ‘When It Comes’ and the alternatingly languid and interrogatory ‘Flip The Script’. Troy Roberts’ funky ‘Trams’ sounds like The Crusaders gone experimental, and Josh Lawrence’s breezily swinging title-track shows how affectionately rooted in big-band traditions they are, for all the mischievous tweaking. This is not an immaculate big-band formation-dance, nor is it meant to be, but it’s an exciting marriage of tersely propulsive themes and maximum jamming potential.