Tim Garland: Libra (Global Mix)
This double disc features saxophonist/bass clarinet player Garland’s Lighthouse Trio – Gwilym Simcock on piano and Asaf Sirkis on percussion, plus guitarist Paul Bollenback on a few tracks and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra on a few others.

Let’s first get it straight that Garland is one of the finest saxophonists around with an outstanding technique and a fabulous tone. He is a strong composer, too, and both his sound and style are perfectly suited to the area he is increasingly working in, which is an area somewhere in between jazz and classical music.

He loves composing and he loves improvising and in this music he is making now all his previous loves seem to come together. Remember that folk-jazz group Lammas he co-led for possibly a decade? Those folk themes come through in some of what he does now. The Spanish influences from his time with Chick Corea show themselves, too.

In Simcock and Sirkis he has two immensely talented cohorts. Simcock is every bit his equal as a composer (and possibly his superior when it comes to the classical side of things), while Sirkis’s intriguing percussion palette (using frame drums, hang drum and bas udu in place of the conventional kit) also bridges the jazz, classical , folk interstices.

The first disc here is taken up by studio trio and quartet pieces as well as a centrepiece suite which features the orchestra; the second disc is live.

There is more richly astounding music here than one could reasonably expect from a few decades’ work, never mind three years, which is what Garland says has gone into this release.

While I think his trio writing is stronger than his orchestral work, that is very much a personal viewpoint; what is not debateable is the fecundity of this man’s imagination and the focus of his ambition. 

Geir Lysne Ensemble: The Grieg Code (ACT)
Another saxophonist and composer with big ideas, and a broader scope, too, because his music has something that Garland chooses to ignore, and that is playfulness and humour.

Lysne doesn’t’ do jokes, exactly, but anyone who can start an album inspired by the music of Grieg with the sound of Jew’s harp and mournful elephant-call tuba has to have a smile on one side of his face, at least.

This is a sort of big band but it’s not like any you will have heard before – though Carla Bley, Frank Zappa and maybe Django Bates might all be inspirations.

These aren’t Grieg pieces reworked but instead originals which might play with Grieg’s themes in fresh and for the most part unrecognised ways, using what Lysne calls the Grieg Code.

What I particularly like about it is that there is some seriously funky stuff going on as a crucial element in nearly everything that happens, whether it is the low, quiet and serpentine lines of Memorits N’Gneng or the recitations and strange sonic landscape of Wonde Hinsisi.

The little electronic noises and other percussion jumbles are beautiful and subtle touches that give the album particular edge when played on headphones. 

Till Bronner: Rio (Verve)
No risk-taking from the German trumpeter with the most sumptuous tone of his generation – instead, a lot of big name friends and a recording of Brazilian classics so dripping with lushness, it’s almost growing exotic blossoms just sitting here on my desk.

Even when on the surface he is making a safe and highly commercial product like this, Bronner still does clever things – like setting up in duo the strikingly different voices of Annie Lennox and Milton Nascimento. Or getting Aimee Mann to sing the evergreen Once I Loved. And in case we doubted his class, he also gets in Kurt Elling and Sergio Mendes.

His close, breathy and voice-like trumpet is closely recorded, as if he were whispering in your ear. Larry Klein is the master producer.

Can there be too many recordings of these Brazilian songs by Jobim and Djavan and Donato and Nascimento? No, of course not. There’s also the fact that when Milton or Kurt sing the world is simply a better place.