Allison Neale was born in Seattle, where her English father worked for Boeing, and raised in Northamptonshire on a diet of his West Coast jazz records. The influence never left: her alto tone sits in the lineage of Paul Desmond and Art Pepper, light and unhurried, even when the tempo says otherwise. Allison held the flute chair in the National Youth Jazz Orchestra in the late 1990s, though it is her alto sound that has carried her career since, alongside stages shared with Duke Ellington’s one-time vocalist Adelaide Hall and West Coast legend Bud Shank. Googlies has hosted Allison before, and each time she has left the room a little “cooler” than she found it.