Inspired by London life, this is a concept album of unusual, old-fashioned ambition. The singer-songwriter side of Ellis’s diverse music career, intimate with Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen, is what makes Life On Land stand out as a jazz album. Her creamy, strong voice and forthrightly melodic piano make no special claim to jazz musicality. There’s instead a deeply felt romanticism about jazz and creative lives, as on ‘The Jazzman’, which imagines a saxophonist facing an audience ready to “cut you down”, but spotlights a balmy Binker Golding solo untroubled by the prospect of baying mobs, and similarly bright, bubbling touches from Rob Luft’s guitar. ‘Ellington Said’ is more lyrically naked about art’s ruinous cost, and giddy rewards: “At worst, she’ll make you selfish and alone/At best, she can heal a nation’s hurt.” Golding returns for a second sturdily mainstream solo here, a long way from his prog and spiritual jazz excursions with Moses Boyd. This is a different gig altogether. Ellis’s virtues are best expressed on ‘Be Kind’, a ballad where piano notes fall with crystalline clarity, and she sings with an ambient glow about life’s mundane and miraculously precious compensations. Her vice is a lack of musically felt lows, in a grit-free urban panorama where it’s always summer. This is a singer-songwriter’s warm love letter to jazz and London. Though much more prosaic than Joni’s Mingus, Life On Land is barrier-leaping in that thin tradition.