A live solo piano performance might surprise fans of Lara Jones and J Frisco, the contemporary post-jazz band she's most associated with. Throughout her intense training as a saxophonist at Leeds Conservatoire it seems she would relieve her insomnia by returning late at night to improvise compositions on the piano in a darkened rehearsal room. A couple of years later a chance conversation with HPBC's Jack Simpson led to a scramble to find a piano going for free. This late-night gig for ‘fellow insomniacs' was arranged at Eiger Studios in Leeds, with Lara and the battered upright bathed in shifting light projections.

Given its genesis, the music is unsurprisingly ruminative, with the sparse and wobbly sound of a neglected instrument in a deserted school hall. The musical ideas develop from an opening metronomic tick to a slowly elaborated descending theme that echoes half-remembered hymn practices. Embellishments accrue slowly, unfolding as if freshly discovered. Their gradual evolution at first recalls the peals of church bells, however there is an emerging emotional undertow that wrestles the theme into crashing dissonance and the sound of strings being struck. Thereafter the music has more intensity, the metronomic pulse returning more assertively, the harmonies more complex and expressive, though the pacing of the music and its development remains restrained.

In all, the single piece lasts 34 minutes before finally returning to that hymn tune and the heavy tolling of a church bell. It's a bizarrely appropriate tribute to her assured judgement as composer and performer, however, that Lara, A Piano at Night is far from being a cure for insomnia.