In jazz legend, this band is one of the great jorchestras and the Monday Nightalbum, cut live at the band’s regular Village Vanguard home in Manhattan is the proof. Here’s all the precision you’d expect of a studio session – with multiple takes and edits – just reeled off flawlessly and live. The writing is challenging and interesting, so that even the familiar ‘St. Louis Blues’ (in Bob Brookmeyer’s skillful hands) takes on an eerie otherworldly quality, so we barely recognise the first or second themes as they steal in on our consciousness. Thad’s flugelhorn floats over the latin section and the final theme, before the tempo briefly accelerates behind Garnett Brown’s trombone, with Lewis and Davis thinking as one, and then after a cadenza it drops back to square one, before launching into swing. It’s this flawless matching of atmospheric playing and writing with complete control of tempo that makes the whole package so complete. In the studio, with a handful of personnel substitutions and the addition of not one but two rhythm guitarists, the band is no less impressive on Central Park North. However, its swing is (even on Thad’s crop of original arrangements) slightly more old-fashioned sounding, so that the name that springs to mind, notably on the ballad ‘Quietude’ is the latterday Basie band when Oliver Nelson or Sal Nistico were writing for him. ‘Jive Samba’ shows the Jones/Lewis Orchestra’s rhythmic flexibility, and the title-track has all its characteristic flair. All in all, two great albums, but as with its earlier records (also available on BGO) it’s the live Village Vanguard atmosphere that brings out its best playing, maybe because of the massed rush of adrenaline in that impossibly compact space!