Richard Fairhurst has an impressive pedigree. Five years after beginning to learn the piano at the age of 15, he was playing at Ronnie Scott’s, and shortly afterwards he began winning awards for composition and performance. Since then he’s recorded with Iain Ballamy, Jasper Høiby and Osian Roberts, as well as recording a piano duet album with John Taylor. His sidekicks on this, his first album in nine years, are longstanding collaborators - particularly drummer Tim Giles, with whom he began his career in the mid-1990s.

Fairhurst’s style at the keys is austere but tuneful, for the most part. The compositions here are all his own, apart from two by his greatest influence, Carla Bley: the restless, questioning ‘Vashkar’, with its lengthy drum intro, and the jerky ‘King Korn’. He isn’t really a rhythm player, though, sounding at his most comfortable with the slow, cascading, rather mathematical ‘Open Book’, and ‘Eclipse’, with its spiralling chord progressions.

The music’s default position is to meander restlessly around the keyboard without ever settling on anything that sounds resolved or even entirely finished. This is not necessarily a drawback - it’s a style, not a fault, and there are many lovely passages. ‘Uplift’, for example is well titled, with its determined, surging melody, and the sweet-natured ‘Farms’ sounds anything but agricultural.

Throughout, Whitford and Giles support the piano with tightly interlocking grooves or punctuation marks as appropriate.