This self-produced, well-packaged album provides a window into one of the best kept secrets in the Northern Hemisphere – the Australian jazz scene. Animarum, Swartz's third album under his own name, won the ‘Best Jazz Album’ award in the Australian ARIA Music Awards in 2018, and deservedly so. Comprising some of Sydney's finest musicians – not least pianist Barney McCall, saxophonists Julien Wilson and (Pastor) Richard Maegraith, and trumpeter Phil Slater – it is both well-conceived and executed. The award-winning bassist is a mainstay of the Sydney jazz scene, and the relaxed ensemble cohesion reflects an empathy built-up working with these key players in various projects over the years. Opening with ‘Someday’ and an assured piano introduction from McCall based around the simple I-V-IV-I progression (check out McCall's impressive curriculum vitae online), this is thoughtful, understated and quietly affecting music; uncomplicated, yes, but each musician is both conscious and subservient to the needs of the music enabling each piece on the album to achieve its purpose. The feeling of thoughtful introspection and unhurried music-making moves into the samba ‘Milton’ with the frontline playing eggs (semibreves or sustained notes) in simple harmony or unison that comes with a well-crafted solo from Phil Slater. ‘Julien Wilson's Sound of Love’ appears as an abstracted homage to Johnny Hodges, albeit on tenor saxophone, and is at a deliciously slow larghetto tempo (Wilson is one of Oz jazz's finest exhibits, as this feature makes clear). It says something about how the overall mood of the album is successfully sustained when one of the fastest tempi on it is the comfortable 120bpm moderato of ‘Emily’. An easy waltz-time delineates ‘Voyage of the Falcon’, the final gesture of album whose modesty of purpose is a powerful demonstration of how less can really appear as more.