Bob Belden's latest album might be considered programmatic or impressionistic, it might be said to employ music concrète techniques, or it might be just plain post-Miles music. Somehow definitions don't seem to matter. Belden thinks impressionistic is a more accurate summation of the music he presents here: eight tracks that together represent a musical portrait of New York (and Manhattan Island in particular), each one infused with its own improvisational drama. Although his excellent Grammy-winning Black Dahlia (Blue Note) from 2001 was with a 65-piece orchestra, there are connections to be made here with his writing for quintet that do not strain metaphor. For a start, Belden is a masterful writer of ballad pieces, and the slower tracks here (my review CDR is so hot off the press I don't have a track listing) seem like a logical continuum of his writing for the earlier album. Certainly, like certain tracks on Black Dahlia, they could equally well function as soundtracks for a film and seem like a contemporary update of his writing for larger ensemble. Equally, just as Black Dahlia seemed an impressionistic portrait of Los Angeles in the 1940s, with its noir-ish writing that seemed of a piece with Jerry Goldsmith's writing for the Roman Polanski film Chinatown, then Transparent Heart emerges in contemporary continuum with its portrayal of the city that never sleeps, with the faster tracks capturing the Big Apple's energy and changing moods.