From the late 1950s, when he was a teenager barely out of high school, Kenny Barron was good enough to play piano for a bebop elite including James Moody, Lee Morgan and Dizzy Gillespie. Now 81, he’s as warmly at one with his materials and his partners as he’s ever been. For Beyond This Place, regular bassist Kiyoshi Kitagawa and drummer Johnathan Blake are joined by vibraphonist Steve Nelson, and rising-star alto sax virtuoso Immanuel Wilkins, while the repertoire joins Barron originals going back to the 1970s (‘Innocence’) with newer pieces and standards (‘The Nearness of You’, Monk’s ‘We See’). A laconic and then springy original from Blake, ‘Blues on Stratford Road’, is a stretched blues showcasing Wilkins’ fresh phrasing even in the most familiar contexts.

Barron has observed that Wilkins first caught his ear for a spacious ballad sound that reminded him of Johnny Hodges, but coupled with a scorching freebop fire all of his own. The saxophonist is hauntingly voicelike on ‘The Nearness of You’, while his sparingly-applied fast passages barely land on each skimming sound. He hurtles off into soaring atonality on the fast-walking swing of ‘Scratch’, with Nelson’s gleaming precision sharply contrasting with his rawness. Barron’s liquid lyricism on ‘Innocence’ has a Corea-like suppleness, and ‘Softly As In A Morning Sunrise’ travels at a skipping pace that triggers the leader’s gleefulness - a quality also glittering from the jaunty stride-dance of ‘We See’. It’s hard to imagine the ageless Barron ever losing that twinkle.