New Jersey-born drummer Mark Guiliana releases his first quartet recording for five years on the high-profile, internationalist, UK-based Edition Records label.

Guiliana is developing a career as leader that's of a lighter, more upbeat mood than many of his contemporaries and he seems less interested in attempting to blur genre boundaries, than completely ignoring they exist.

No more so than on this new quartet release, the sound of listening [sic]. It has the high-quality production values demanded of contemporary electronica, adding a fresh clarity to the jazz quartet format sonicworld. Only the most pop-allergic type of jazz listener will turn their nose up at the seductive avant-pop that infuses some of the tunes here, including opener ‘a path to bliss’ that is reminiscent of his Mehliana duo partner Brad Mehldau's Highway Rider album in places.

On the other hand, second track ‘The Most Important Question’ highlights the whirling folky jazz sax of breathy tenorist Jason Rigby on a theme that resembles bebop in its snaky syncopated phraseology.

Guiliana's sharply inventive real-time contemporary beat-making is a sonic delight throughout. Shai Maestro, as with Guiliana, is an ex-sideman of Avishai Cohen's trio and also an excellent ECM recording artist, and he improvises with a sensuous verve.

The multi-layered shiny retro synthonic ‘The Courage to Be Free’ and ‘The Sound of Listening’ are more Aphex Twin than Nordic jazztronica while ‘Everything Changed after you Left’ swerves curiously from a Charles Lloyd-ish ballad theme to a kind of lounge jazz rumba while last track ‘Continuation’ shifts from buoyant African jazz to Avishai Cohen's middle-eastern jazz lyricism. For the most part it's an accessible, wonderfully tuneful, feel-good record, not common attributes in the work of his peers in the contemporary jazz world. Ironically then, the sound of listening might not have broad appeal, so much as appeal more to the broad-minded.