Composer and arranger Miho Hazama leads a 19 piece big band through some advanced and wide ranging originals on this recent release. You get a hint of influences from Thad Jones and Bob Brookmeyer’s bands, with clever and original chart work combined with a swing feel. There’s a plethora of intricate section work, with the sax section giving an intro to they journey of “I Said Cool, You Said…What” while the horns float around Mads la Cour’s flugelhorn after piano and flute float in the opening of “Your Scenery Story”. Clarinet and reeds out front give a pastoral mood to the elegiac “Home” with a flowing solo by pianist Henrick Gund” while the brass is bold and confident, delivering left hooks and right crosses on the punchy shuffle of “Mimi’s March”. The horns float around Karl-Martin Almqvist’s tenor on the lovely “Green” with some nimble drum work delivered by Soren Frost under Mads la Cour’s muted trumpet on the kind of blueish “Mingle-Mangle Goody Bag”. Modern musings for a genre that needs to be kept alive.