Everyone has heroes. Even musicians who have been said to have found their own voice as a composer or improviser will have drawn inspiration from someone, and Uli Beckerhoff is no different. A trumpeter who has made his mark across Europe over the past four decades, Beckerhoff has listened widely to music and jazz in particular and if you ask him about his origins as a musician and the people he learned from, he’ll speak warmly of a gallery of people who helped to shape his path.

Listening to Heroes, you might not pick up on Beckerhoff’s early admiration for the British trad jazz trumpeter Humphrey Lyttelton but an adopted Brit, the Canadian-born master Kenny Wheeler’s presence is instantly felt in the opening track, Ti Saluto, a solo trumpet dedication to a recently departed friend of many years. Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Keith Jarrett’s ‘Scandinavian’ Quartet, Weather Report, Jimi Hendrix and the Norwegian poet of the trumpet, Arve Henricksen are others who came into Beckerhoff’s thoughts as he guided his young accomplices – all students he encountered as a music professor in Essen – through a programme put together like a concert set-list.

As someone who likes – needs, in fact - to hear variety coming from the stage, Beckerhoff sketched out different moods, encouraging his rhythm section to go for atmosphere rather than form on Tango Tragico, to rock out with guest guitarist Tim Bücher on Heros, and to groove in a similar way without copying Jarrett’s group on Nach Vorne. Music, for Beckerhoff, has to evoke a feeling or a sense of place and in the thirteen tracks here he has captured locations, times and personalities in notes, tones and deeply expressed, myriad hues.