Perhaps not so celebrated in his own right as his brothers Thad and Elvin, and (in his own opinion) not as gifted a pianist as his elder sister Olive, who died young, Hank Jones was a master of jazz piano, whose work spanned the end of the swing era, the emergence of bop, and the establishment of mainstream.

This welcome set from Acrobat covers the recordings he made under his own name between joining Ella Fitzgerald’s trio in 1947, and temporarily leaving live performance to join the CBS music staff in 1959. His 1947 solos reveal an accomplished player, with Tatum-esque runs and a sense of shape and form in his solos, although the transfers are rather muddy and suffer from excess surface noise. The 1953 trios with guitarist John Smith and Ray Brown are much better remastered, and give us a chance to hear an alternative to the contemporaneous Nat Cole and Peterson instrumentation, especially on a rhapsodic ‘Little Girl Blue’.

Everyone I’ve spoken to about Hank rated him as an accompanist above all else, and a selection of tracks with guests shows this talent at work with Donald Byrd (a sumptuous ‘Don’t Blame Me’), and on a slow, reflective ‘How High The Moon’ with Joe Wilder. Aside from further elegant piano solo tracks and a snapshot of a session with flautist Bobby Jaspar, the second CD here focuses on Jones’ long partnership with guitarist Barry Galbraith. The two phrase as one, especially on ‘They Look Alike’, and their solos trade to and fro imaginatively.

The chosen pieces here include a few that precede and follow the (never completed) Gambit records project from 2005 to present the complete recordings by this Jones/Galbraith quartet (plus some sides with Kenny Burrell), making this new set a perfect addition to those earlier CDs.