This album from Austrian multi-instrumentalist Christian Muthspiel is a ‘Tribute to John Dowland’, the great English Renaissance composer and contemporary of Shakespeare. All 10 cuts are based on Dowland's ‘Lachrimae’, or ‘Seaven Teares’ instrumental cycle and, on this evidence, Dowland's polyphonic musical originals remain as fertile for reinvention and reinterpretation as Old Will's evergreen lines – well, almost. If Dowland's ‘Lachrimae’ has come to define musical melancholy (in much the same way that Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy defined the mood in literary terms at around the same time), Muthspiel's reworking runs a much wider emotional gamut: ‘Happy Tears’, with the leader's jazz-fusion e-piano washed over with flurries of vibe from Franck Tortiller, is positively groovy; ‘Bitter Tears’ and ‘Crocodile Tears’ have great woozy trumpet lines from Matthieu Michel; ‘Frozen Tears’ is appropriately crystalline and still, while Steve Swallow's electric bass drives on the archly jokey, angular fun of ‘Tears of Laughter’. It won't quite have you in fits of giggles – and certainly not streams of tears – but it will leave you full of admiration for Muthspiel's transformatory musical vision.