Beard is rightly feted as one of fusion's more intelligent keyboard sidemen, but that still won't prepare you for the pleasures of this solo piano outing. Like Larry Goldings' solo In My Room, Show Of Hands smacks of being a very personal recording, with its simplicity and guileless love of melody belying its real and substantial pleasures. Like Goldings, Beard has mixed his own compositions with an eclectic mix, including standards such as ‘But Beautiful’ and folk themes like ‘It Was A Lover And His Lass’. Even when he chooses a fusion related song, such as Shorter's ‘Face On The Barroom Floor’, he re-works it into a playful orchestration all his own. And interspersed between these major workouts are vignettes, ‘Haiku’ as Beard calls them, which lace the whole together. Not everything works; Beard appears more comfortable within a song structure, while freer, naked pieces such as the Jarrett-like ‘Song Of The Sun’ don't quite gel. But overall this evocative album is one you'll return to after the flash and fashionable have had their day.