Sarah Hanahan is right there in the thick of the NYC mainstream sound, touring internationally with Joe Farnsworth and The Mingus Big Band, appearing at international festivals as a single under her own name, and playing with her own quartet everywhere across the USA where there’s a club that’s anything like the legendary Smalls.

She’s a graduate of the Jackie Mclean Institute Of Jazz at the Hartt School and shares something of Jackie’s unmistakeable tone, definitely on the side of astringent rather than sweet. However, despite the bold inclusion of Coltrane’s ‘Welcome’ from his Transition album as the opening track on her debut album, she doesn’t show much sign of sharing Jackie’s adventurous disposition.

The setlist here is a canny choice of bulletproof jazz and songbook standards (‘Stardust’ and Jimmy Heath’s ‘On The Trail’) with her own originals which stay on well-trodden paths of melodic accessibility within recogniseable radio-friendly parameters. Within this zone she can certainly deliver.

Hanahan's own ‘Honey’ has a gentle calypsonian lilt that sounds like a genuine 1960s pop classic; ‘Resonance’ is a minor-key 6/8 vamp in the tradition of the mini-genre that sprung up in the wake of ‘My Favourite Things’; ‘We-Bop’ is a two-chord uptempo burner spiced, as they say, with Afro-Cuban percussion over which Hanahan wails briefly but enthusiastically. On the mighty Luther Vandross vehicle ‘A House Is Not A Home’ (nice choice) she sounds more like David Sanborn than Jackie Mclean – which after all is no bad thing.

The A-list band are as muscular and confident as you’d expect and Marc Cary’s expansive, grooving riff-based piano is a perfect fit for Hanahan’s direct, audience-friendly approach.