It’s entirely apt that James P Johnson – the most historically significant musician of the 1920s Harlem Renaissance; composer and ‘Father of Stride Piano’; mentor of Duke Ellington and Fats Waller – should be remembered for his piano-playing first. As a pianist, Johnson transformed the plod of ragtime into a rhythmically sophisticated ‘feel’ beyond anything that could be written down. Ragtime morphed into jazz – for definitive revivalist jazz, look no further than Johnson’s 1940s Blue Note sides with Edmond Hall and Sidney De Paris. But Johnson the ‘symphonic’ composer didn’t make anything definitive. Marin Alsop bookends Johnson’s orchestral works with his earlier jazz compositions Victory Stride and the meta-iconic Charleston – a shrewd move, as this is where Johnson’s art springs from, she tells us, and tap dancer Frederick Boothe is downright taptastic in the Charleston.

When he decided to become what jazz musicians refer to as a ‘long hair’ composer, Johnson wanted a piece of the prestige Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue and Duke Ellington’s early masterpiece miniatures had handed them. But nothing here quite equals Gershwin’s striking imagination or Ellington’s sense of exquisite self-investigation. Concerto Jazz A Mine is a self-conscious attempt to ape Rhapsody in Blue; American Symphonic Suite, a paraphrase of WC Handy’s St Louis Blues, even quotes the Rhapsody; and the clunky episodic structure of Harlem Symphony does its catchy, evocative melodic material no favours.

But Drums has a tightness of organisation that is genuinely composerly. Driven forwards by a timpani motif that torches a swirling, tearing-it-up percussion cadenza midway – a moment echoed later with a tumbling flute and timpani duo – Johnson’s characteristic rhythmic stride ignites the whole work. It feels satisfyingly unified; idiom-perfect performances, too.