Steve Kuhn is a master pianist with a master pianist’s touch. He was a child prodigy who studied in Boston under the now legendary piano teacher Margaret Chaloff (baritone saxophonist Serge’s mother), and he has a photographic memory. That’s very useful in jazz, since by his own estimate he has memorised more than 4,000 songs – and even more useful since his main source of income is playing New York society gigs where the rich and famous are likely to pluck the most obscure tune out of the air and expect ‘the hired staff’ to rattle it off without a blink of the eye. Some of Kuhn’s finest work was in the 1970s, captured on ECM, and a retrospective glimpse of his work on the label was provided in 2008 with the three CD box set Life’s Backward Glance. His work in the 1980s is perhaps less assiduously documented, but the mainly solo album Mostly Ballads is a classic, while Life’s Magic on the Blackhawk label from 1986 issued seven tracks from the same four night stint in March 1986 at the Village Vanguard that provided the material for this album (albeit not duplicating any tracks). Originally released on Owl Records, The Vanguard Date is perhaps a more rounded picture of Kuhn’s pianistic style – his beautiful touch, his sense of dynamics, his eloquent lyricism that seems distantly related to his one time contemporary Bill Evans and a seemingly bottomless pit of original ideas which enables highly original interpretations of material as varied as Jule Styne’s ‘Dance Only With Me’, Ron Carter’s ‘Little Waltz’, Jimmy Van Heusen’s ‘I Thought About You’ and Tadd Dameron’s ‘Super Jet’. Add three of his originals and this is a piano masterclass.