Sigfrid Karg-Elert (1877-1933), best known for his organ music, composed his Op 153 in 1929 following a five-year creative drought. He’d been introduced to the saxophone some 14 years earlier and, as Raaf Hekkema tells us in an extensive note, Karg-Elert intended these 25 Caprices and Sonata to ‘help pave new paths in terms of technique and expressive means. Paths that serve not only jazz.’ There are a few jazz elements sprinkled here and there (try No 6, a ragtime, or No 10, a cubana), as well as some unexpected references (I hear a brief homage to Till Eulenspiegel some 18 seconds into No 5, a giga, for example), although all of these are thoroughly absorbed into the composer’s highly cosmopolitan musical language.

According to Hekkema, the published first edition is rife with ‘ambiguities, inconsistencies and (sometimes) obvious errors’, and as no autograph score has survived, this recording presents the Dutch saxophonist’s own edition, the product of decades of research. Hekkema, a linchpin of the intrepid Calefax Reed Quintet, is a profoundly expressive player with an elegantly lean tone. He takes more time in nearly every instance than Christian Peters, whose 2008 recording of Op 153 is the only other version I know, and the result emphasises the music’s lyricism over its brilliance – although Hekkema’s virtuosity is equally impressive in every respect.

Saxophone players and aficionados will likely want to gobble this whole; others might find it easier to savour a few movements at a time, as I did.