Scottish drummer Corrie Dick is perhaps best known for his work with Blue-Eyed Hawk. Impossible Things actually isn’t a million miles away from their pioneering sensibility sharing for instance a strong literary flavour in the setting of Lewis Carroll, arranged by Lauren Kinsella, contributing to the title track a piece also imbued with a Mike Westbrook-like feel in the compositional span.

There’s a progressive direction to the overall style that switches and twists from Celtic and North African styles to grooving contemporary jazz, with plenty of melodic and scalar ingenuity and not forgetting the odd big saxophone solo thrown in for good measure (blustery opener ‘Soar’ combines several of these facets on just one track).

The material is Dick’s, and it’s bright and clever and reaches out beyond any rigid formula and isn’t afraid to become intimate and personal, for instance on the poignant ‘Don’t Cry’ at the end, Alice Zawadzki making a big impact here on the most affecting song of all.

Other collaborators in a talented line-up besides those already mentioned are Joe Webb on wurlitzer/organ, Matt Robinson, piano, Laura Jurd, trumpet, George Crowley and Joe Wright saxophones, Felix Higginbottom, percussion and Conor Chaplin on bass. That sounds like quite a lot of players but the album possesses the intimacy of a much smaller unit.

Released on 20 November.

Corrie Dick plays Jackdaw in east London on 27 and 28 November.

A live version of fourth track ‘Annamarrakech’ is above