Cedille celebrates its 30th anniversary with a cool recital by saxophonist Julian Velasco, winner of the Chicago-based label’s first Emerging Artist Competition for talent from the Chicago area. Described in his booklet notes as ‘a mixture of American, Canadian, and Mexican cultures … classical, jazz, and popular musical backgrounds’, Velasco, together with Winston Choi, creates a string of unique solutions to a series of intriguing conceptual propositions.

The heart of the recital is Steven Banks’s Come As You Are, an affirmation of the tenor sax as a concerto instrument, drawing on the heroic nature of the whole double-reed family painted with a Romantic palette of emotion and colour. The second movement is a jazzy, Impressionist fantasy, the third an outpouring of song with a lovely grand introduction for the pianist. The raucous finale, ‘Lift My Hands’, pulls out all the stops with a conclusion mounting to a Beethovenian climax.

David Maslanka’s Tone Study No 5, based on Bach’s four-part chorale ‘Wie bist du, Seele’, seems to be a gorgeous peaceful lyric until its surprising epilogue. John Anthony Lennon’s Distances Within Me consists of crystalline objects intersecting with abstract angles and lines. Amanda Harberg’s three Court Dances include an ‘Air de cour’ with the feel of Fauré’s Pavane and an intoxicated ‘Tambourin’ riff. Elijah Daniel Smith’s seductive Animus twirls out roulades with fluttering hints of the sheep in Strauss’s Don Quixote. Christopher Cerrone’s Liminal Highway, 17 minutes of resonant chirps, beeps and buzzes played without break, makes the perfect finale. What a way for a young saxophonist to break into the big time