The UK has produced some extraordinary jazz pianists of late: Deschanel Gordon (who has recorded with Tomorrow's New Quartet), Sultan Stevenson (whose much-praised debut album has just come out), and others like Luke Bacchus and Noah Stoneman, who are starting to get noticed.

Still only 22, Eddie Gripper began to study jazz in 2019, with Huw Warren. 2019: let that sink in. And now here he is already with his own debut piano trio album. The tunes are all originals, often meditative in character, as so much of lockdown-composed music has been, with a distinctively cool, airy quality, reminiscent of Marcin Wasilewski. Gripper’s classical training is obvious in the evenness and restraint of his playing, sympathetically complemented by bassist Ursula Harrison and drummer Isaac Zuckerman, so that between them they impart a pleasing, stripped-down quality to the music. At the same time, the arrangements are fully thought through, the improvised passages alternating with written sub-sections.

While always melodic, Gripper’s melodies are not the kind that instantly lodge in the memory; rather, he sends out long, tendril-like lines of melody that take their time to explore and evolve. This slightly elusive quality encourages repeated listening, as you try to familiarise yourself with the tunes and their cunningly varied time signatures, as on ‘Castle’. ‘Lament’, which seems to have been inspired by the death of Gripper’s grandmother and other bereavements, begins with an angry sweep across the piano’s strings, followed by some searching bass work from Harrison. The title track is a more relaxed affair, whose phrasing and bouncy rhythm evokes Abdullah Ibrahim, while the trio swings comfortably on the chipper ‘A Song Unsprung’.

In its maturity of approach and deftness of execution, Home is a significant achievement by any standards.