A new album from Ahmad Jamal is always an event, as he has seldom stood still in his career, always looking for new settings, new ideas and new material. Although (between periods of semi-retirement) he has preferred a quartet format in recent years, there's nothing settled about it. The rhythmic variety created by Herlin Riley's drumming – showing an encyclopedic grasp of rhythm section playing – and Manolo Badrena's percussion varies the texture beguilingly, while the interplay between Jamal and James Cammack's bass is apparently casual, but actually deeply nuanced. For example, in the vamp out of which ‘Autumn Leaves’ gradually appears, disappears and returns again, a left hand piano figure becomes a bass ostinato, as Jamal superimposes a second repetitive figure over the bassline. He has always been a past master of building and releasing tension, of dynamic contrasts, and of juxtaposing alarmingly forceful piano figures with playing of such exquisite delicacy that the listener is seduced by the sheer beauty of his touch. On this album we also share the degree to which France, and its southern seaport of the title in particular, has seduced Jamal himself. The dreamy opening title track, where Jamal cunningly superimposes a lazy modal texture over the paradiddles and ratamacues of Riley's snare drumming, brilliantly creates two moods at once, and this sense of dreaming while time passes relentlessly is recaptured in Al Malik's declamatory reading of the lyrics, and Agossi's sensuous singing of them. By weaving the other tracks, mainly new, but also containing two standards, into the spaces between the three versions of ‘Marseille’, means that the album is also conceived as an entity. Individual tracks, including a muscular version of ‘Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child’ repay separate listening, but the record rewards listening right through as a whole, in just the way a Jamal concert set unfolds, with a mixture of being self-referential and bravely exploring the new.