Jazz
Summit Records · 7 August 2026
The “Suite For Sean Jones” takes up four movements and twenty-two minutes, and it is the new material here. Ayn Inserto does not set it up as a biographical portrait of the trumpeter: each movement (The Artist, The Educator, The Husband And Father, The Human Soul) arranges the orchestra differently around him, and Jones keeps changing register while the ensemble moves. It is the only place on the record where the writing and the improvising genuinely compete for the lead.
The rest is a selection from Inserto’s earlier work. “Eshel Sketch” opens with interlocking countermelodies and ends on eight bars of solo piano from Billy Test, the best-calculated contrast in the programme. “La Danza Infinita”, already recorded by the Colours Jazz Orchestra in 2015, is the most spacious piece, and the WDR draws a harmonic richness out of it that the earlier version lacked. “BJ’s Tune” was written by Jones and arranged by Inserto, and leads into the suite.
The Cologne band turns out in full: five trumpets, four reeds doubling clarinet and flute, Jens Neufang on baritone and bass clarinet, four trombones with Mattis Cederberg on bass trombone, and the rhythm section of Billy Test, John Goldsby and Hans Dekker. Inserto, born in Singapore and based in Boston, has led her own orchestra for twenty-five years, and in 2024 the WDR invited her to present an evening of her music; this recording comes out of that.
Seventy-nine minutes is within a couple of minutes of a CD’s physical limit, and this one uses all of them. Putting a twenty-five-year retrospective and a new twenty-two-minute suite into a single sitting means the short pieces in the middle (“Vinifera”, “Down A Rabbit Hole”, “Mr. Jones And Company”) get crushed between the opening and the big closing block. It works far better across two days than in one go, which is a polite way of saying it is badly sequenced.
Summit Records released it on 7 August 2026, recorded in Cologne. Ten tracks.
Rating: 7.4/10
Text by Aina Torrents