Chatzitsakos is a Greek bassist with a deep and abiding love of American jazz. He left Berklee as a summa cum laude graduate, already garlanded with multiple scholarships and awards, made his first recordings with the Ralph Petersen NextGen Big Band, and now resides in New York, so you may conclude that he is a hip cat indeed, and so this recording demonstrates.

Here he is at the helm of a mini-Big Band which his dextrous and detailed arranging magically transforms into a much larger ensemble, presenting some carefully wrought, immaculately presented re-imaginings of modish selections from the repertoire.

He’s assembled one hell of a band of young tyros - check out Robert Mac Vega-Dowda’s trumpet solo on Dizzy’s gloriously silly ‘Land Of Oo-Bla-Dee’ - and together they romp through the complex arrangements in which no contemporary trope is omitted - there’s tight rhythm section switches on ‘I Didn’t Know What Time It Was’, reharms galore on ‘Tangerine’, odd number meter on ‘All Or Nothing At All’, straight-up mainstream vocal swing on ‘Social Call’, and rhythmic displacement on ‘I’ve Grown Accustomed To His Face’ - plus some good old-fashioned lush balladry on ‘You Know I Care’ to finish up. Singers Alexandria De Walt and Ermina Sofou have a nicely understated Blossom Dearie style cool to their delivery that reinforces the knowing insider ambiance.

This might sound excessively arch, but Chatzitsakos keeps a firm hand on the tiller - his own playing is great, the arranging is genuinely outstanding, and the band’s truly formidable chops are matched with an unselfconsciously youthful energy and pizzazz that carries the day.