This is a charming album from one of the UK's leading guitar players and instructors. Esmond Selwyn trained with Chuck Wayne in New York in the late-1970s and later George Van Eps. Despite this impressive lineage and the influence he has exerted on later generations of musicians, Selwyn's talents as a group leader have remained underexposed. All the same, on this disc he has the chance to stretch out luxuriously across eight well-chosen standards, beginning with Clifford Brown's ‘Sandu’ and proceeding via a Latin-sprung ‘Green Dolphin Street’ and a smoochily seductive ‘Darn That Dream’ to climax with ‘I Hear a Rhapsody’, where Selwyn demonstrates his harmonic mastery and trades licks with the always inventive John-Paul Gard on Hammond. The Middle Half doesn't attempt to reinvent the jazz wheel but there's enough taste and technique on display here to make it worth a listen.