You wouldn’t think jazz and choral music would mix well but flautist Lamb shows they can; it probably helps that she is a composer and her husband, Gerard, is a jazz trumpeter.

You can guess the gist from the title; the tracks are The Frog and the Ass, The Hare and the Tortoise, The Fox and the Crow, The Mouse, the Bull and the Flea and The Ant and the Grasshopper, with a bonus track of My Little Wife.

The opener mixes the genres fairly smoothly: the choral, almost churchy, element could be focusing on the glory of God but in fact is telling the tale of the frog, accompanied by relaxed jazz trumpet. The frog comes to a sticky end by being greedy.

The Hare and the Tortoise is, as you might expect, jauntier, with strings augmented by jazz trumpet. The Fox And The Crow is a slow one, with jazzy alto sax, and brought Barbara Thompson’s Wilde Tales to mind (though we’ve not heard it for years).

The Mouse, the Bull and the Flea has a medieval feel to its opening, with as much spoken word as singing. The song warns about how a flea might be small but can really annoy a bull. A really interesting album.