Linley Hamilton, the Northern Ireland trumpeter, teacher, broadcaster and promoter, is revered in his homeland for his spirited playing, for his tireless advocacy of jazz, and not least for his hosting of an internationally popular jazz venue at his farm in County Down.

Ginger's Hollow- a tribute to a much-missed farm cat - brings together classy Dublin musicians Derek ‘Doc‘ O'Connor on tenor and Cian Boylan on keys (O'Connor and Hamilton were mainstays of the lineup in The Commitments movie) with the formidable US rhythm section of Mark Egan and Adam Nussbaum on bass and drums. Hamilton's devotion to buoyant, upbeat jazz is plain from the opening ‘Shinebox’, with its classic 1960s soul-jazzy hook for the horns over Nussbaum's smacking backbeat, and there's a stomping Crusaders-reminiscent bounce to Cian Boylan's ‘Sunday Morning’, bookending shapely phrase-swapping solos from Hamilton and O'Connor. The title track is a gracefully gliding Hamilton original underpinned by Boylan's gleaming fluency on Fender Rhodes, while the throbbing ‘Place At The Ace’ is a highlight, a fastmoving, subtly harmonised tailchase of catchy motifs echoed and overlaid around the band and vivaciouly powered by Egan and Nussbaum. Boylan's ‘Jason's Dream’ with its pensively lyrical solos from the horns and his own piano poignantly reflects the family bereavement it commemorates.

O'Connor, an engagingly fleet, Michael Breckerish tenorist, fittingly cranks up the temperature on the headlong finale, ‘Watch Those Eyes’. There aren't too many surprises on this tracklist perhaps, but they weren't Linley Hamilton's intention: the warmth and expertise this music is played with is unmistakeable.