The 22-year-old NYC-based Swiss saxophonist, Grand, discovered the music of Steve Coleman by way of her father, who fell under the spell of his Hot Brass Sessions, before she was born. Things came full circle as Coleman became one of her mentors when she relocated to the east coast – she features on the veteran's 2016 release Synovial Joints – and she has wasted little time in asserting herself as a creative force in her own right. Most significantly, Magdalena is a concept album in which all of the elements presented, from overarching idea to compositions to artwork (a stunning fold-out card executed with an origami-type ingenuity) amount to a bold statement. Celebrating “the feminine, not as a dualistic force but as part of a whole”, Grand draws on both mythology and history to craft music which is an interesting synthesis of art and pop sensibilities. The varied palette sees her move from melodies that have some of the acute intelligence and slanted phrasing of Laura Nyro to intricate, mazy rhythmic constructions that occasionally bear traces of Coleman's vocabulary. However, Grand brings a strong personality to bear on the material throughout, setting a limpid tone and fluid lines against the stark combustion of Jeremy Dutton and Rahsaan Carter's drums and bass on busy, funky pieces such as ‘T1 Isis’, while drifting with a Lloyd-like grace across sparser arrangements elsewhere. The result is an idiomatically varied album that reflects the considerable swathe of cultural information switched-on contemporary musicians can access, and more to the point, how they can fashion original work through an imaginative implementation thereof.