The Professors of Pleasure, John Doheny’s Tulane University faculty jazz band, use their second CD, Volume Two, to put on a clinic in modern jazz performance and composition. In less capable hands, we’d need to worry that the recording would sound clinical, but that isn’t a concern here. Instead, the interactions between the band on a collection of original compositions, Harold Battiste pieces, standards by Miles Davis (“Half Nelson”), Hank Mobley (“This I Dig Of You”), and James Van Heusen (“Nancy with the Laughing Face”), and a rousing version of the Tulane University fight song set to a second-line beat make for a fun, expressive and often whimsical exploration of what Doheny calls modern New Orleans jazz.

John Doheny and the Professors of Pleasure strike the perfect balance between pedagogy and practice. The Tulane music school Faculty Quintet offers a rundown of several jazz styles as well as a primer in how to approach playing them. Drummer Kevin O’Day, who contributes so much in the many hats he wears on the current scene, opens the proceedings with the march time intro to Alan Matheson’s sprightly “Jackson Square,” but he’s soon swinging the beat behind saxophonist Doheny, who takes the first solo with a lighthearted tone, and Frederick Sanders on a funky piano solo. O’Day plays great accents off of Sanders’ percussive mood and behind John Dobry’s guitar solo. Jim Markway’s confident, pocket-defining bass work frees O’Day to be as creative as he likes without worrying about the rhythmic foundation of the piece. The communication between bass and drums is an object lesson on how important the rhythm section is to the success of a jazz quintet, even though the rest of the players get the lion’s share of the solo spots.

Tenor saxophonist John Doheny is a native of Vancouver, Canada who makes his home in the Crescent City these days, doing graduate work in jazz history at Tulane.

Most of the nine tracks on this disc are in the five-to nine-minute range, allowing him and the other musicians in his quintet ample time to strut their stuff, and they do. Backed by Norm Quinn on trumpet and flugelhorn, Ridley Vinson on acoustic and electric piano, Allen Johnston on acoustic bass, and Stan Taylor on drums, Doheny and company kick up quite a storm.

There is nothing better, in my estimation, than a straight ahead jazz group without a pretentious bone in its body. This is exactly the feeling I got when listening to the current CD release entitled the John Doheny Quintet-one up, two back. Tenor Saxophonist John Doheny has put together a great selection of jazz compositions played by a fiery quintet that makes one want to sit in because it sounds like so much fun. John wrote four originals for the CD and the opening original 'One Up, Two Back' comes steaming out at a blistering tempo like early Bird and Dizz Be Bop recordings.

With One Up, Two Back, Vancouver saxophonist John Doheny offers up a little West Coast hip. It bops and swings and slides with an energy more in tune with a gig recording than a studio session. From the frenetic opening of the title track to the final off-kilter note on "Perdido" there's a nice club feel to the whole package. This is not your cafe jazz.