He had made albums with Eddie Gomez and Jimmy Witherspoon, and Michael Brecker had guested on the Outlet CD.

However, By the Company You Keep was his first solo album, and also his first for an international label, Toshiba EMI. He felt he had something to prove.

The company he chose said plenty, and the fact that the musicians were willing to work with him said as much about the buzz going around the industry about the young player from Hong Kong who'd made his heroes - Pat Metheny, John Abercrombie and John Scofield - sit up and take notice.

Brecker agreed to appear on two tracks - Herbie Hancock's Cantaloupe Island, and Estate, the Bruno Martino tune made famous by Joao Gilberto.

Jack DeJohnette played drums, Jon Patitucci played acoustic bass, and Pao covered everything else on guitar, live with no overdubs, without the safety net of a second harmony instrument. It's hard to imagine a more challenging rhythm section that could have been convened at the time. They pushed him, and he proved his worth.

By 1994, when the tracks were recorded, Pao was already an accomplished composer, but decided to stick to tunes the players already knew for the sessions, saying he wanted to make 'a real blowing album'.

He chose Don Grolnick's Nothing Personal for a fast, aggressive fusion-bebop workout, and Bobby Troup's The Meaning of the Blues for a contrastingly slow, thoughtful interpretation. Cantaloupe Island has a funky edge honed over many a night playing it with the Jazz Club house band. He and Brecker share the solo honours.

Angel Eyes is a popular standard among jazz musicians because of its stimulating changes, and prodded along by DeJohnette, Pao and Patitucci make the most of them. DeJohnette's own Silver Hollow, from his 1978 New Directions album, allows all three players to show their gentler side, while Alone Together again demonstrates Pao's fluency and imagination playing over fast changes. Estate, contrastingly - in fact, almost incongruously - closes the album with a bossa nova beat.

By the Company You Keep sold respectably for a jazzman's international debut but no more copies were pressed after the initial run, and for many years the album has been almost impossible to obtain. Now reissued in an audiophile Japanese pressing by New Century Workshop, it's once again available from jazzworldcds.com and from the company's shop in Central.