GROWING up in south London, the musical tastes of drummer Moses Boyd’s family were nothing if not eclectic.

“My parents played lots of gospel and soul,” he tells me, “and as a teenager I listened to hip hop, garage and grime.

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He has a musical kinship with all the great drummers, from Max Roach and Philly Joe Jones to Tony Williams and Ed Blackwell. “The list is endless!” he declares.

He met his musical partner, saxophonist Binker Golding, a decade ago while playing in Tomorrow’s Warriors and in the late trumpeter Abram Wilson’s band and the mutual empathy has grown with every year.

“Since then, we’ve played together in many different groups,” he says. “So our playing has developed alongside our friendship.”

On the album Alive in the East? the duo are augmented by some very powerful talents — trumpeter Byron Wallen, jazz harpist Tori Handsley, fellow drummer Yussef Dayes and the revolutionary horn of septuagenarian tenor saxophonist Evan Parker, pioneer of British free improvising.

It’s “a privilege and thrill” to play with musicians of the stature of Parker and Byron, he says.

“Both have a strong musical identity and are really comfortable in expressing it. So to be a part of their improvisations is always a great journey.”

He’s similarly enthusiastic about playing alongside virtuoso harpist Handsley on the album. “I had played quite a lot with Tori, so we already had a musical chemistry. She’s a very open and sensitive improviser and wherever the music leads she’s great at creating a new path that inspires everyone with her.

“You don’t know where or what’s going to happen — you’re always on your toes.”

Moses’s drums, insurgent and rhythmic, open the album with The Birth of Light and two generations of tenor saxophone palaver on How Land Learnt to Be Still, before Wallen’s yearning trumpet calls out in a deeply affecting solo.

On The River’s Tale, Handsley’s harp plucks out a current below the horns, while elemental riffs are ignited within a cavern of drums on How Fire Was Made.

How Air Learnt to Move powerfully narrates the great Charlie Parker’s artistry and the Boyd and Handsley unity is the foundation for Children of the Ultra Blacks, aided by some scintillating Wallen.

Mishkaku’s Tale has the Binker-Moses duo in storytelling mode, with Handsley’s mythical, questioning strings adding to the plot, as if each new strummed sound were a new strand in the story.

The Discovery of Human Flesh is more Parker-Golding colloquy and Beyond the Edge is all percussive duality, with Moses and Dayes and the horns in ensemble, while Handsley’s beautifully lucid harp-song rings through the closing sounds of the final track The Death of Light.

More than five decades separate the ages of these musicians, yet there is both unity and contemporaneity in their amalgam of sounds, with Parker and Wallen as young in spirit as their bandmates.

As Moses says: “There’s a great merge of youth culture in the music — how it looks, where it’s played and who’s playing it.

“Now it feels like a more honest reflection of Britain than in previous years of the jazz world.”

Alive in the East? is released by Gearbox Records.