Formed originally out of the SFJAZZ Collective following a performance at the Montreal Jazz Festival, James Farm boasts a pedigree line up. Unlike the repertoire band from San Francisco, the quartet performs their own self-penned tunes with writing duties split between all band members, and have an approach to composition that seems to draw mostly from a range of post-1960s popular acoustic singer-songwriters. The original material on City Folk, the follow up to the eponymous debut released in 2011, has a harmonic simplicity more readily associated with rock and pop even if the form it takes is the same as for familiar jazz ‘standard’ blowing. But the soloists stretch the tunes harmonically, at least to achieve the desired balance between tension and release, and the leading mainstream post-bop saxophonist Joshua Redman does this with great fluency. The pianist Aaron Parks plays perceptively in this context as he has revealed previously on his excellent debut recording Invisible Cinema for Blue Note on which drummer Eric Harland was also present. There are some parallels also between this recording and pianist Brad Mehldau's more pastoral pop-orientated work, especially the 2010 release Highway Rider, a recording to which Redman made a key contribution. City Folk is a gently eloquent brand of contemporary jazz served up with some refined pop sensibilities.