Laura Jurd is to unleash her latest album Human Spirit on 19 January. One element of the album, its fast and furious Milesian effects-drenched street funk, hasn’t sounded so on-the-button in a while, the trumpeter taking the album on the road during release month with dates including London, Bristol and Newcastle.

Details are so far fairly sketchy about this Chaos Collective label album (its Harry Potter-like cover is above) except that Jurd’s band features singer Lauren Kinsella from Blue-Eyed Hawk + Pigfoot co-leader trumpeter Chris Batchelor, trombonist Colm O'Hara, guitarist Alex Roth, Mick Foster – unusually for us, probably not him – on the monster bass saxophone, and Corrie Dick drums. 

Jurd’s Landing Ground released in 2012, when the former Trinity Laban student was only 21, was an assured affair featuring original work of hers arranged for a jazz quartet plus the strings of the Ligeti Quartet, at times her sound recallling long-ago Kenny Wheeler themes injected with a newly conjured adapted Nordic inflection on some tracks. Jurd also features on large ensemble album Island Mentality released a little under a year ago.

‘She Knew Him’ above is second track in on Human Spirit