There’s an inviting warmth to the sound of this album, thanks presumably to Stockholm’s Yardhouse Studio, giving a rounded fullness to Hannes Bennich’s alto saxophone and Tomas Sjödell’s double bass. But it isn’t just in the recording: Bennich’s playing often has an easy-going almost languid tone and the melodies throughout this album – inspired by dreams – are fluent and lyrical.

That’s not to say he can’t put a bit of fire into his playing, as at the end of ‘Not American’ where his ecstatic sax climbs above a climactic crescendo before falling back into wistfulness, but his breathy vocalised counterpoint to Helen Salim’s hushed vocals on ‘It Ends Now’ is especially impressive. That is the only vocal track, the other eight being carefully written instrumentals that use the four players well. Estonian pianist Britta Virves is a gently forceful presence throughout, whether briskly driving the EST-evoking riff of ‘For Essie’ or quietly and meticulously stoking the emergent melodies of ‘Interlude //In Peace’ towards a lyrical coda. There’s a vivid piano trio passage in ‘The Traveller’ which provides Emil Norman the chance to assert himself – on the whole he demonstrates judicious restraint, but this brisk waltz-time tune is probably the snappiest of the set.

Norman is Danish, Sjödell Norwegian and Bennich himself a Swede so it is hardly surprising that there’s a strong Scandinavian flavor to the album but, having said that, the elegiac ‘A Flower’s Last Wish’ leans to a kind of New York cool with Sjödell’s impeccable bass and Bennich’s unhurried sax easing the album to its close.