The repertoire on Velvet Brown’s fourth recording for Crystal is of such absorbing interest and the playing of such high quality that in a parallel universe she might be the next Sarah Willis – the repertoire is not the same but the adventure is.

Brown begins as out of a mist, softly with joy, in Barbara York’s commissioned elegy for the death of a friend’s infant son. Roger Kellaway’s tribute to Martin Luther King reflects the civil rights movement’s roots in gospel and jazz, punctuated at the end by a single powerful chord that symbolises King’s strength of will, then exalted in a loving outburst of virtuoso energy.

John Stevens’s tribute to Tommy Johnson – who played the iconic high solos in John Williams’s Jaws – commissioned by the LA Phil’s longtime principal Roger Bobo, turns out to be an aural equivalent of everything that tubas are about: size and gravity and beauty. Each of Meyer Kupferman’s riveting Sound Objects, scored as precisely as Bach to maintain the independence of the three instruments, has its own sophisticated internal structure in which Brown, Amy Gilreath and Ron Stabinsky engage in a series of inter-related, occasionally intertwined and often jazz-derived riffs. In the third they create an unexpectedly exhilarating adventure by randomly playing a set of six phrases.

Drew Bonner’s Naptown was conceived by Brown as a love letter to her hometown of Annapolis, Maryland. The music has a sauntering grace that embraces both classical tuba chops and, in the final few minutes, a series of licks that pay tribute to the great Howard Johnson and his jazz tuba band Gravity