Too many musicians treat ‘Great American Songbook’ standards with a deadening reverence that is noticeably at odds with the mischief, heart-on-sleeve sincerity and twinkly-eyed whimsy which sits at the heart of the best of these songs; other people (hello Annie Lennox, Lady Gaga, Jeff Goldblum) have so little to say about them, you wonder why they bother – especially in a world where this new album by the experimental composer, improviser and keyboard player Alvin Curran has raised the creative stakes so dramatically. Curran gained his grounding in improvised music as a member of the group Musica Elettronica Viva, founded in Rome in 1966, alongside heavyweights like Frederic Rzewski, Richard Teitelbaum and Steve Lacy. MEV’s calling card was their all-immersive soundscapes, an obsession which Curran carried over into his own compositions – and now into these re-imaginings of songs by Fats Waller, Duke Ellington, Hoagy Carmichael, George Gershwin, Johnny Green et al. Curran describes his trusty Yamaha Disklavier as allowing, “the whole world to become audible directly from my finger tips” and his remake of ‘Tea for Two’ sets out his stall most clearly. Art Tatum busyness spills over into high-wire keyboard wizardry reminiscent of Phineas Newborn Jr or Don Pullen, as Curran drizzles a collage of extraneous noises, vocalised screams, static hiccups and jaunty countermelodies (in an alien tuning) over the top. But his radical 16-minute re-composition of ‘Ain’t Misbehavin’’ speaks most powerfully, Curran’s stuttering deconstruction of Waller’s theme slamming into howling dogs, sexual groans, pockets of hip-hop scratching and someone reciting text who sounds suspiciously like John Cage.