During the 2015 EFG London Jazz Festival, supertrio Phronesis teamed up with the formidable Frankfurt Radio Big Band to play a set of rhythm-bending reworkings of the trio's signature themes, imaginatively recast by Julian Argüelles. That experience was an inspirational memory for Phronesis pianist/composer Ivo Neame when he pondered documenting a new repertoire of his own big band music at the start of the 2020 lockdown. Neame assembled a glitzy international lineup that wouldn't physically meet, including London saxists Nathaniel Facey, George Crowley and Jason Yarde, Israeli guitarist Gilad Hekselman, and Canadian trumpeter Ingrid Jensen, to record these dizzying polyrhythmic parts separately – and picked up the studio skills along the way to fuse the fragments into a thrillingly seamless whole. 'Rise Of The Lizard People' is Neame's musical riposte to conspiracy theorists, represented as a set of thoughtfully articulate solo statements weaving through a wild maelstrom of jaggedly anarchic grooves and cross-rhythmic riffing.

The creative drums pairing of James Maddren and Jon Scott constantly steers the music, doing so with particularly restrained drive around Ingrid Jensen's whimsically elegant trumpet break on the serpentine 'Strega'. Kenny Wheeler's slow-burn harmonic ambiguities are recalled in the introspective 'Broken Brains' (blossoming in George Crowley's tenor improvisation), 'Phasing Song' glimpses Birth of the Cool in its warmly hypnotic ostinatos, and the free-jazzy 'Persevere Part 2' makes it hard to credit that the musicians aren't in the same room. There have been some fascinating instances of isolated jazz artists' ingenuity in the pandemic era, but this wide-screen triumph by Ivo Neame is one of the standouts.