A delight­ful, joy­ous record­ing, great fun and deep plea­sure from begin­ning to end. This band doesn’t recre­ate the sound of the immor­tal Quin­tette du the Hot Club of France, although the instru­men­ta­tion is almost the same, the three gui­tars and bass line-up miss­ing only a vio­lin. No musi­cian in their right mind would try and emu­late Django Rhein­hardt and Stephane Grap­pelli in any­thing other than verve and joi de vivre, and these four do just that. Their play­ing com­bines the light­heart­ed­ness and steam-roller power that were a styl­is­tic fea­ture of Hot Jazz with a mod­ern taste for har­mony and intro­spec­tion. Their chord sub­sti­tu­tions on “Saint James Infir­mary” simul­ta­ne­ously dis­rupt the tune and bring it, whole, into entirely new ter­ri­tory.

The QHCF was a night­club band that hap­pened to find its way into the stu­dio. They played for peo­ple to drink, dance and get a lit­tle wild, and their absolute bril­liance was highly extro­verted. Con­tem­po­rary work­ing sit­u­a­tions for jazz musi­cians are dif­fer­ent, espe­cially for the rel­a­tively lonely souls seek­ing their art in the sound of a dis­tant era. Les Doigts de l’Homme bring a pal­pa­ble long­ing, a bit­ter­sweet bite, to their ren­di­tions. The emo­tional depth is some­thing that makes this record­ing stand out from the pack of style-specific bands, and will have you lis­ten­ing to it repeat­edly, deep into the night. One of the bet­ter things I’ve heard in many years.