Scotland’s Spartacus label was naturally going to choose this week to release the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra’s remake of Bobby Wellins’s 1963 Culloden Moor Suite. Whether or not the romantic defiance in Wellins’s often pipe-like sound influences the vote, however, it’s an uplifting jazz statement from the 78-year-old Glaswegian sax player and his homeland’s superb big band. Wellins wrote this music not long before he recorded the famous Under Milk Wood suite with his long-time playing partner Stan Tracey, and there are fascinating links to Milk Wood’s brilliant tone poem, Starless and Bible Black, in Wellins’s plaintively quivering melody over mallet-rolls and piano trills on Culloden Moor’s opening Gathering. A military snare drives the blues-boogie March, with Wellins’s characteristic uptempo figures – cryptic upturns, hurried descents, resolving low-note honks – wriggling through it. Battle is a tumult of jagged rhythms, barking riffs, and squealing brass receding to tenor-sax exhalations. Epilogue is mournful yet eventually stirred by rising brass harmonies to the composer’s final steadfast long-tone hoot. Wellins’s unique sound, Florian Ross’s arrangements, and the SNJO’s polish and power, add up to another triumph for Tommy Smith’s inspiring jazz orchestra.