The LA-based, Armenian pianist-composer Tigran Hamasyan continues to break new ground with his acoustic piano trio’s outside-the-box interpretations of Broadway-to-bebop standards on his new recording StandArt. It’s perhaps the most integrated example of his highly original personal language that’s evolved through a high level, action-packed career over the past decade. Albums so far have drawn discerningly from his Armenian folk music heritage, classical studies and ECM-style world-jazz ambiences through to a more high-voltage in-yer-face aesthetic that’s absorbed elements of contemporary thrash metal, math rock, pop, prog, electronica and Carnatic rhythms.

Here though, Tigran pays loving homage to his acoustic jazz roots with something like an organic synthesis of all those elements. Ugly jazz-rock chords are plonked on Charlie Parker’s ‘Big Foot’ theme but it doesn’t stop guest saxophonist and fellow Nonesuch labelmate Joshua Redman hurtling through the most straight-ahead swinging changes Tigran has put on record to date, the latter also demonstrating his delicate prowess on straight-bebop. Not the same treatment for Elmo Hope’s ‘De-Dah’ though, the other bebop classic here, which has Tigran’s signature stop-start riffy metrics written all over it.

Circle of fifths evergreen ‘All the Things You are’ features saxophonist Mark Turner and is perfectly re-contextualised as a dreamily impressionist folk-ballad. Elsewhere guest Ambrose Akinmusire’s intensely elusive trumpet gives ‘I Should Care’ a different if no less valid emotional weight as the well-known Chet Baker rendition. The remodelling of ‘I Didn’t Know What Time it Was’ with slouching hip-hop groove and neo-soul-ish vibe is a more seductive highlight. It’s a testament to the twentieth-century American jazz songbook’s timelessness that contemporary jazz musicians can still see it as the ultimate challenge. Only the very few such as Tigran are able to make it sound fresh and new today.