(Contemporary Jazz) The Tommy Evans Orchestra - The Green Seagull (2 CD) - 2012, WEB, FLAC (tracks), lossless

Tommy Evans, the young, Leeds-trained musician whose teachers have included Matthew Bourne, has already won some high-end attention as a big-band writer (including the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors' Contemporary Composers' award), and he has a key role in the innovative dubstep group Submotion Orchestra into the bargain. This suite - a chronological tribute to the work and life of his parish-priest uncle David Partridge (a marine who became an active pacifist, a priest who prays at the mosque, an interfaith preacher of acceptance and tolerance) - was performed at the London jazz festival - but its subtleties are rather better portrayed on this double album, which includes both the original themes and a collection of producers' remixes. Evans very effectively uses a trio of singers instrumentally, and sometimes recalls the hard-riffing directness of the early Mike Westbrook band in the way rousing ensemble sections trigger dynamic – and sometimes unexpectedly smokey – sax improvisation. There are stamping military tattoos, poignant minglings of pub-piano twangs and slowly pulsing horn textures, free improv (notably from formidable bassist Dave Kane), churchy solemnities from flutes and low woodwind, and some delicious mixing of brass-band sounds with the fragile cooing of the singers. Evans has come on a long way since his graduation. (John Fordham, Guardian)