I can guarantee that - unless you have been living under a rock with cotton wool in your ears - you will have heard Phil Todd. Not heard of him, necessarily, but his playing. If you have seen Sam Mendes' mega-box-office Bond outings, Skyfall and Spectre, George Clooney in the Fantastic Mr Fox, if you have watched Strictly Come Dancing, the Andrew Marr Show, been lucky enough to catch the Guy Barker Big Band or Colin Towns' Mask Orchestra or bought tickets for any number of West End shows that require a razor-sharp pit band, he's in the soundscape of all of them on flute, piccolo, clarinet, alto, soprano, tenor or baritone, as well as on the EWI less familiar (ee-wee, the Electronic Wind Instrument, of which more later). Phil is a "player's player", not a household name (and I suspect he likes it that way), but among those who work in the precarious business of professional musicianship, he is known for his versatility, incredible chops, musical curiosity and both a big sound that can bring a smile to your face and a lovely, gossamer touch when something more delicate required.

And I suspect many of those who know him from that setting will be very surprised indeed by his first solo album. Which is exactly what he expected.

Unfinished Business is many things: a long overdue personal expression by Phil, a love letter to the past, a roadmap of highways that were never built, a homage to mentors, a voyage of self-discovery and a calling card for the future. It is also, thanks to the involvement of Phil's sons Alex (drums) and Nick (mixing and mastering) very much a family affair.

The sound it celebrates is one that grabbed Phil the moment he heard it as young music tyro in a record shop with fellow National Youth Jazz Orchestra member trumpeter (and later composer and arranger) Guy Barker. Having heard and played all the bebop greats (Parker, Gillespie, Adderley) that were (and remain) the lingua franca of jazz schooling and finding none of it really spoke to his heart, it was a revelation when Barker insisted the man behind the counter (a semi-pro jazz drummer called Al Merritt) put on the first Brecker Brothers album ("When Michael Brecker took his first solo, I started crying," Phil says now). Then came the first David Sanborn and Tom Scott and The L.A. Express. "I listened to all three in their entirety in the shop, bought them and felt like I had discovered my people."

Not only were they his people, it turned out he was soon fluent in the language, with three years in Jeff Clyne's fusion band Turning Point which in 1981 led to him being talent-spotted by trumpeter Ian Carr and a ten-year stint with Ian Carr's Nucleus and subsequently the Ian Carr Group. "Ian was a fantastic influence on me. He was always a free spirit and he liked to surround himself with musicians who were willing and prepared to experiment and push the music forward. He gave me an enormous amount of freedom and I got up to all sorts of musical mischief. I went through an Evan Parker phase while I was with Ian and he didn't say a word." The Nucleus-esque track The Guru is dedicated to Ian.

Towards the end of his time in Nucleus another cornerstone of this album came into Phil's life - the EWI, basically a wind-powered synthesizer. He had already been experimenting with pedals and delays on regular wind instruments, but he first heard the EWI played by Michael Brecker on the Step's Ahead album Magnetic (1986). "I can still remember the tingling sensation when I heard In A Sentimental Mood and the slow build," he says. Interestingly, it was the "total expression" of an electronic instrument in the hands of Brecker than captivated him. "The ability to make something electronic sound organic completely blew me away."

After a little fancy footwork he managed to obtain a pre-release UK model from Akai, and set himself the task of mastering it in six weeks, in time to debut it live at the next Nucleus show (where it replaced the soprano on a couple of numbers). He recalls his wife Kim lifting off his headphones at five in the morning and observing wryly that he had finally found an instrument he could play 24 hours a day.

Not long afterwards, jazz-rock or jazz-fusion hit the buffers in terms of fashionability. Phil dates the sudden demise to the arrival of the first Wynton Marsalis Quintet with its retro-manifesto and the rush by players to form groups playing variations on bebop. That still wasn't Phil's language (although as Guy Barker and Colin Towns will testify, it certainly trips off his tongue when required).

So, he moved into the more commercial world of music, appearing on a dizzying array of '80s pop hits by Jaki Graham, Sinitta and much of the Stock, Aitken and Waterman output, coupled with regular film and television work.

He still used the EWI over the years, but found it was required to interpret other people's musical ideas or taking advantage of its many voicings, such as playing the second flute part, rather than its own (and his) solo voice. It was when he bought the EWI 4000 in 2010 that the idea of this album began to take shape. After all, he had unfinished business both with the instrument and the style of jazz that first inspired him ("Groove based music," as he puts it) that is currently being rediscovered by a new generation, such as DJ Gilles Peterson and an army of youngsters who have sampled Nucleus records.

You can hear both the electronic and acoustic incarnations of Phil Todd on the monstrously riffing opener Funkenstein, where the Creature and the Baron face off. But which represents the Monster and which the Creator in the battle between the EWI and the tenor sax? You'll have to decide.

Funkenstein is the sole creation (sadly in the studio, rather than a lightning-bleached castle laboratory) of Phil, but elsewhere you will hear him in the company of great players like Mark Wood (also a Nucleus alumnus) and Justin Quinn (whom Phil met, and was impressed by, when they were working on the Commitments) on guitars, the shape-shifting Lawrence Cottle on bass (his CV morphs from Black Sabbath to his own Big Band), Trevor Barry also on bass and Dave Arch (both Strictly colleagues) on keys, percussionist Shan Chana (who was guilty on a nightly basis of show-stealing Bombay Dreams) and Alex Todd on drums. There is (somewhere in there, once it has been processed by Phil's jazz sensibilities) evidence of his sons' love of heavy metal on Voodoo Strut, and the cinematic- all those soundtracks, you see - vision and the pull-out-all-stops-out climax of the closer The Last Hero. But above all, you'll hear the sound of a man relishing the freedom to make his own music at last.

This album doesn't just pick up and weave together threads from the past, it also charts a course for the future. With more material already written for further recordings and the man raring to get started on them, Phil Todd is now open for business.

Rob Ryan, Author and Jazz Fan !!