Wait 40 years for a solo piano recording from Mike Westbrook, then, stone me, two come along virtually at once. Starcross Bridge is, if it's at all possible, even more intimate and elusive than 2016's Paris. Like Jarrett's The Melody at Night, with You, the music is almost too personal, too heartfelt to open up its secrets. We hear through a veil, often of tears. And yet it is in that witnessing of an artist easing yet pleading, sometimes blithely at one with his art, at others challenged and defeated, that the beauty and strength prevails. As Philip Clark's wise notes suggest, there's something painterly in Westbrook's approach: each track is complete in itself (though some segue into others), yet, like late Turners, they are also suggestive rather than solid, to an airy suspended thinness: chords, Messiaen-like, hover and decay, melodies elide and fall: some songs are vividly deconstructed like Lennon/McCartney's ‘Because’, some split apart before us like the extraordinary take on on Strayhorn's ‘Johnny Come Lately’. And beneath it all, the blues, as on ‘For Terenzi’, roll and tumble. Starcross Bridge is a rail crossing close to the Westbrook's Dawlish home. One side the sea, on the other a cosy pub. And that's what this release brings us: wide wild vistas on one side, hunkered down delight, warm with detail on the other. But as a devoted Ellingtonian, Westbrook may also have in mind the Duke's ‘Star-Crossed Lovers’; either way, the album is a love letter to Westbrook's muse, his wife Kate, their relationship as entwined, inspired and inspiring as the eternally young Romeo and Juliet's.