Nevada-born Brian Landrus is a specialist in basement-register instruments – baritone sax, bass clarinet, low-end flutes and more – and that pursuit has brought him work as a sideman with a multitude of artists across the genres, from Esperanza Spalding and Maria Schneider to The Temptations and The Four Tops. Landrus is joined on For Now (an album occasioned, as his liner note suggests, by a seismic period in his life both musically and personally) by sparky trumpeter Michael Rodriguez and a gold-standard rhythm section of Fred Hersch, Drew Gress and Billy Hart, plus a string quartet including New York jazz violinist Sara Caswell. The repertoire joins lustrously harmonised, hard-bop-reminiscent groovers (‘The Signs’, ‘Her Smile’), softly strings-shadowed ballads (‘Clarity In Time’, ‘For Whom I Imagined’), a smoky and then swinging account of the standard song ‘Invitation’ – and two Thelonious Monk covers, ‘Round Midnight’ and ‘Ruby My Dear’. There's a romantic and sometimes melancholy movie-score feel to much of this set that may not entirely grab jazz listeners in search of surprises or edge, but Landrus delivers a fine baritone sax account of rich long tones and delicately circuitous embroidery on ‘Round Midnight’, and another in duet with the ever-poetic Fred Hersch on ‘Ruby My Dear’. For Now might be an apposite title, however – for a clearly personal project that hasn't quite found a home outside its accomplished creator's psyche.