Laura Jurd: Island Mentality (Chaos Collective CC002), Human Spirit (Chaos Collective CC004)

Blue-Eyed Hawk: Under the Moon (Edition EDN 1054)

Laura Jurd is a powerful young English jazz musician whose work is now bursting out joyously from a number of diverse and surprising settings.

She grew up a long, long way away from New Orleans in the Hampshire village of Medstead, played her parents’ piano and learned trumpet at primary school, developing an eclectic love for classical music (Bartok and Stravinsky in particular caught her ears) as well as jazz and folk. After school she moved on to the Trinity Laban Conservatoire in south London, where she encountered brilliant jazz tutors trumpeter Chris Batchelor and saxophonist Mark Lockheart.

By 2011 she had won the Dankworth Prize for jazz composition and in 2012 cut her first album as a trumpeter, Landing Ground. As she told Lockheart: “I just like making things up. I never thought about it or why I was doing it, or where it would lead. It felt like something I had to do.”

That adventurous discovering spirit runs right through the album she made as part of the quartet Blue-Eyed Hawk, called Under the Moon. Together with Irish vocalist Laura Kinsella, guitarist Alex Roth and drummer Corrie Dick she creates an amalgam of jazz and poetry, particularly inspired by the lyrics of two Irish masters, W B Yeats and Seamus Heaney.

The harmonies wrought by Kinsella’s birdlike voice, Jurd’s lyrical searching hornsong, the electronic soundscapes over Dick’s pounding drums and Roth’s rococo strings are a new sound in jazz, as in the reinvention of Over the Rainbow, now called Somewhere, or the embrace of Yeats in O Do Not Love Too Long, where Jurd’s trumpet, lucid and vulnerable, shows Kinsella’s words.

There is a beautiful fragility to her sound too in For Tom and Everything. She strides out in Try to Turn Back and in Heaney’s valediction her chorus above Dick’s piano chords is airy and skyward like a sonic blossom blown by the wind.

Jurd was 21 in 2013 when she directed, as co-founder, the 20-piece Chaos Orchestra for their album Island Mentality, with her old tutor Lockheart guesting on one track.

I never thought I’d hear Donne’s great sermon No Man is an Island in a big band jazz context, but Jurd manages it with potency and a swinging riposte to Ukip and little England. Mike Underwood takes a vibrant tenor saxophone solo.

Strange attractors is a Lockheart piece and Jurd responds with squeezed high-pitched solo phrases. On Jurd’s Horses for Courses Lockheart ploughs in with his own alto chorus.

Roth’s closing composition, The Charm of Impossibilities, sustains spectral ensemble sounds before the piano of Elliot Galvin and Dick’s rustling drums bring a sense of solidity, while the engrossing orchestral timbre becomes huge, compelling and tolling for all of us.

And looking at the 10 sleeve photographs of the musicians, they are all so young, their faces full of joy and hope. It radiates in their sounds.

Jurd’s latest 2014 album Human Spirit has another bird on its sleeve — not a hawk but an owl — and includes a smaller group of her musical friends: Kinsella, Dick, Roth and Batchelor. The tunes and lyrics are all hers.

The thematic Opening Sequence is about a flying bird observing and praying for the humans below her. In She Knew Him, Jurd’s exultant horn soars, dives, chokes and melodises before Mick Foster’s bass saxophone delves deep. Batchelor’s trumpet sings out at the beginning of Brighter Day before Colm O’Hara blows an eloquent trombone chorus.

Jurd’s cadences open Blinded, tumbling from the birdways before O’Hara’s solo and Roth’s rock inflections carry forward a story of a desert traveller stricken by the sunlight. Her solo in the album’s title tune rises freely over Dick’s relentless drums and Foster’s bass saxophone beat, and in More Than Just a Fairytale her horn shares the narrative with the singer, her notes as expressive as words before Roth’s twanging guitar becomes the storyteller.

The album’s Closing Sequence has the bird blessing the earth and its people with a wish for peace, and Jurd’s trumpet takes on its longing with an elated, burnished resonance of swooping and ascending hope.