There's nothing that whets the appetite for digging into a new release quite like discovering that it features a ‘live electronics iPad performer’ among its cast of players. And this Duke Ellington/Billy Strayhorn tribute features not one but four. Not that, having listened to this soi-disant ‘provocative’ project from leaders Cuong Vu and Richard Karpen, I'm entirely clear what those iPad performers actually do. But no matter: this is a fab avant-garde reconfiguration of the jazz canon. (Unless of course you only like trad jazz, in which case you'll probably think it's totally whack.) It begins with a five-minute drum solo – naturally – entitled ‘L'Heure Bleue’, a veritable blitzkrieg of ‘sonically enhanced’ stick work from Ted Poor: such sweet thunder, as the Duke himself might have described it. Vu, on treated trumpet, and Karpen, rolling around his piano keyboard, make their entrances on moody second track ‘Indigo Mist’. Turbulent and unsettled, ‘Lush Life’ belies its title before ‘The Electric Mist’ ramps up the atmospherics for a semi-orchestral assault on the senses.