Hi-Res Downloads

96kHz/24-bit WAV, ALAC, FLAC*, Naim CD195 (supplied by www. naimlabel. com) Burn is the 2013 debut album from the winners of a MOBO award last year. Sons Of Kemet are a London-based band famed for rattling the rafters with boisterous and eclectic jazz-with-a-twist.

There’s little musical innovation to savour in this collection of piano compositions from Canadian pianist Pascal Mailloux, whose career has been writing music for films, TV shows and commercials, and collaborating with Montreal-born singer Marjolène Morin (aka Marjo) over the years. Still, he does conjure up some delightful melodies, and the performances by his accompanists are polished throughout. I’ve found myself returning to ‘Morning Mist’ for its intriguing chord progression and Dave Gilmour-esque slide guitar break. And ‘October Sky’ is another infectious track.

96kHz/24-bit WAV, ALAC, FLAC, Naim Jazz Records Naim CD206 (supplied by www. naimlabel. com) Former Brand New Heavies keyboardist Neil Cowley – a child prodigy playing Shostakovich piano concertos at the age of ten – can arguably lay claim to being one of the world’s most heard pianists in current times, having accompanied Adele on both her 19 and 21 albums. This fifth release from the trio with drummer Evan Jenkins and bassist Rex Horan (who replaced Richard Sadler after 2010’s Naim album Radio Silence) sees Cowley once again crossing myriad musical boundaries.

Although the last two Schubert sonatas are reissues from 2002, Paul Lewis has re-recorded the A-minor and C-minor (D784/958), again at the Teldex Studios Berlin, last spring. And in any case we haven’t had the higher resolution until now. There’s very little difference in sound: perhaps the new recordings are in tighter focus with less ambient sound, but it’s marginal. No-one I have heard makes more sense of the central outburst in the Andantino of the Sonata in A (D959); and Lewis’s Schubert suggests more affinity with Beethoven in its overtness – it’s a very different approach from that of the ‘reverent’ Mitsuko Uchida or even Paul Lewis’s mentor Alfred Brendel (whose example he followed in 2002 by omitting the exposition repeat in D960(i) – perhaps one day he’ll be persuaded otherwise).

The theme of this album is composers who found new lives in Hollywood, some but not all escaping from Germany in the 1930s. Korngold’s Violin Concerto is the longest work in selections, not exclusively for films, spanning from 1908 up to Schindler’s List and American Beauty. We hear themes from Casablanca, Ben Hur, El Cíd, et al, ‘Tränen in der Geige’ bringing relief from the general romantic wash. Max Raabe is good in ‘Speak Low’ and Daniel Hope’s friend Sting appears to swallow his mic in one arrangement.

Italian pianist Stefano Bollani has covered many musical styles since becoming a professional player at the tender age of 15, his jazz collaborations with trumpeter Enrico Rava gaining him international recognition. Recorded in NY’s Avatar Studios last year, but only recently released, Joy In Spite Of Everything sees Bollani alongside drummer Morten Lund and bass player Jesper Bodilsen (both from Bollani’s working trio) joined by Mark Turner and jazz guitar maestro Bill Frisell. From the laid-back calypso style of the opener ‘Easy Healing’, with a tremendous contribution from Turner’s tenor sax, this modern jazz quintet sparkles with musical inventiveness and tremendous playing throughout the album. A bit more ‘air’ to the sound would have been welcome, nevertheless the tonality and textures of the band’s instruments are colourfully depicted.

Classically trained Swedish pianist Jan Lundgren has made some 40 albums under his own name since graduating from Malmö’s Academy of Music in 1991. Flowers Of Sendai was recorded late last year in Italy, for the French BeeJazz label, since when Lundgren has further released a collection of standards from the great American songbook entitled All By Myself for Barcelona-based Fresh Sound Records. Here Lundgren is accompanied once again by bassist Mattias Svensson and highly accomplished Hungarian drummer Zoltán Csörsz Jr (who famously filled the seat of Jaime Salazar in Swedish prog-rock outfit The Flower Kings and has taken over from drummer Morten Lund in Lundgren’s Trio). Audiophiles will be impressed by the recording quality that puts the trio in a natural acoustic with the instruments clearly delineated in ‘open’ space.