Pianist and composer Andrew McCormack – one of UK jazz's most imaginative graduates of the inspirational and inclusive Tomorrow's Warriors education programme – has led bands from classic acoustic trios to hook-reciting, mathematically groove-tight electric outfits, but this is the imaginative solo piano debut he has sounded more than capable of for at least a decade. McCormack's resourcefulness embraces a McCoy Tyner-like percussive power, a knack for giving familiar materials contemporary spins, and an inclination to fastmoving idiomatic scene-shifts within pieces – jazz-improv to baroque counterpoint, for instance.

The pianist recorded much of this music as personal reflections throughout 2016, but observes that it was only last year that he began to appreciate they were opening up a new soundworld – an insight he turned into a set full of doubletaking twists, idiomatic variety and virtuosity harnessed by narrative. McCormack gracefully balances delicacy of touch, romantically swooping themes, rocking grooves, and constant shifts of harmony on the opening ‘Dream Catcher’; arrestingly juggles motifs and register leaps on the initially quietly-vamping ‘Crystal Glass’ and the stridently walking ‘Nomad’; delivers a breezier but devoted cover of Thelonious Monk's ‘We See’ that seems to mingle baroque music and the Charleston; mixes Stravinsky into a borderline-abstract version of the standard song ‘I Can't Believe That You're In Love With Me’, and plays ‘Nobody Else But Me’ and ‘For All We Know’ in perpetual-motion whirrs and tender manipulations of bits of the original's melody respectively. This is a terrific solo piano set, and one of Andrew McCormack's best releases.