Outer Worlds Jazz Ensemble

Outer Worlds Jazz Ensemble is an ongoing jazz project and release series from Leeds-based ATA Records, conceived by bassist and label founder Neil Innes to put a spotlight on the scene's hard-working sidemen while drawing in visiting soloists from further afield. The project records exclusively to two-inch tape at ATA's studio — a disused garage stocked with vintage 1960s equipment — and the results sound like it: warm, deliberate, and rooted in a lineage running through Yusef Lateef, Alice Coltrane, and David Axelrod. Its debut release paired Chip Wickham's baritone saxophone with percussion-heavy rhythms that owed as much to New Orleans street jazz as to the Eastern modal explorations of Blue Note's stranger corners. The 2026 LP The Kármán Line pushes further — flute and harp over impressionistic piano on some tracks, bassoon and French horn channeling 1970s Quincy Jones on others — a record that holds together less through genre than through a shared sense of unhurried searching.