Leo Genovese’s second album on the Brooklyn-based independent label 577 Records, which celebrates its twenty-first anniversary this year, displays a superabundance of imagination. Opener ‘Fiesta Time’ sees Genovese’s piano lines build to an almost player piano-type intensity and complexity, carving out huge harmonic blocks of material across the entire range of the piano, with Cabaud and Williams providing the most fleet-footed support. On four songs, including the transfixing, all-too-brief ‘De Tanto Llorar’, the electrifyingly expressive Argentinian singer and composer Nadia Larcher provides the perfect aesthetic counterweight to Genovese’s searching pianism. The multiple metric shifts of ‘Howaria’ showcases the trio’s consanguinity of mind in terms of its approach to pulse and phrasing, while ‘Cyclic Requiem’ draws out playing of enormous lyricism from Genovese, with accompanying ostinatos from Cabaud and Williams that maintain an incredible rhythmic buoyancy. Best of all is the brilliant ‘Burn the Waltz’, which possesses a granitic strength and grandeur and finds Genovese at his most freewheelingly virtuosic, pouring out notes in teeming single lines and powerful block chords. Recorded at Studio Cara OJM, Porto, Portugal, special plaudits must go to Nuno Couto for the superb recorded sound.