Recorded at the Woodward Theater, that handsome old Cincinnati room, the release runs to six tracks, a number that sounds modest until you hear how generously the band stretch them. Nothing here is hurried. Grooves are allowed to settle, simmer and eventually boil over, and the audience, audible but never intrusive, plainly knows it is being treated to something special.

The core quintet is a delight. Nick Blasky's bass is the sort of low end that makes shoulders loosen involuntarily, round and patient and quietly authoritative. Jason Smart's drumming pushes and pulls against it with a conversational ease, while Matthew Hawkins' percussion dusts every bar with rattle and shimmer. Brad Myers' guitar is a model of economy, all clipped chords and sly, sinewy lines, and Michael Mavridoglou's trumpet cuts through the haze with a bright, mischievous swagger. They play like men who have long since stopped needing to look at each other.

Then the guests arrive, and the evening swells into the family gathering of the title. The up-and-coming saxophonist Josh Kline and trombonist Spencer Merk bring a youthful, sharp-elbowed energy, their solos darting forward with the confidence of players who know exactly whose stage they are borrowing and mean to repay the favour. Meanwhile, keyboardist Jackson Steiger and the horn men Colin Thompson, Wayne Kilgard and Jonathan Wiseman, sitting in from Cincinnati's Afrobeat-funk institution Ernie Johnson, add a rolling, polyrhythmic heft that tilts the whole enterprise toward Lagos by way of the Ohio River. The brass, now a proper phalanx, hits with a joyous wallop that left this listener grinning at the ceiling.

Much of the material springs from founding keyboardist Paul Hogan, and his compositions remain the quiet marvel of the band. They carry a jazz musician's appetite for harmonic mischief and a funk musician's absolute respect for the pulse, so that the music can surprise the head without ever abandoning the hips. Hogan's tunes are generous vehicles, wide enough for a dozen players to climb aboard, yet shaped enough to feel like songs rather than mere jam sessions.

Credit is due to the engineering, too. Nicholas Radina's live capture and Ashley Shepherd's mix and master at Audiogrotto preserve the air in the room: the brass blooms, the kick drum thumps, and the cheers arrive sounding like cheers rather than applause samples. Nothing has been laminated flat. For those who prefer their music in tangible form, the limited 300-copy vinyl run, hand-numbered and hand-stamped, with Rob O'Brien's concert photography and liner notes, looks every inch the collector's prize.

Thirty years on, Ray's Music Exchange sound neither weary nor wistful. They sound like a band who have earned their friends, their horns and their right to a long night out. Put this on, turn it up, and invite somebody round.