Pianist Ray was MD for Tony Bennett from 2016 through to the late singer's retirement in 2021 but is clearly a highly capable instrumentalist when let loose under his own steam having released an array of impressive small group albums. This new one reunites him on record with Lockwood and Walker, this trio having first come together in 2014.

Here are a dozen pieces, highly varied in style and content, opening with Monk's ‘Bye-Ya’, its stop-start feel unleashing some assertive piano figures, Walker like a second voice, Ray building tension admirably. The album's highpoint, for this listener, comes with Oliver Nelson's immortal ‘Stolen Moments’, taken quite solemnly at first, the theme sensitively deployed, the unhurried ease of the improvisation like a bell. Marvellous. And then as if to emphasise the trio's broad range, comes Ray's ‘NO Worries’ which opens with Walker's Crescent City-style drums and then moves into a second-line strut, Ray quite oblique, electric piano cushioning his solo.

I liked the blues feel on Dave McKenna's engaging ‘Theodore the Thumper’. Its single-line, insistent shape prompting swing and getting it. James Taylor's sweet ‘Fire and Rain’ unfurls Ray's inner Jarrett with a beautifully calm reading, the harmonic ideas, and its ruminative mood quite engaging. Factor in a later Jarrett composition (the tricky ‘The Windup’) and others by Carla Bley, Oscar Peterson (the lovely ‘Nighttime’) and a tribute to Chick Corea by Ray himself and you have the perfect palette of possibilities, the trio meeting every challenge head-on.

As Ray says, disarmingly: “It's just three guys playing jazz.” Superb sound, by the way. Seek it out.