Giant Step Arts is ace photographer/recording engineer Jimmy Katz's own label, set up to present work that might not otherwise get a hearing. A busy presence in the studios with many releases under his own name, Boston-based Palmer is a fluent improviser who is now making his way in academia.

This impressive double CD must be his most ambitious project to date, comprising a dozen of his compositions each inspired by a piece of ‘lost’ art.

To explain: back in 1990 thieves entered Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and removed 13 works of art of great renown. Three decades later, their frames still hang empty. Palmer's suite seeks to pay tribute to 12 of them.

Thus it opens with ‘A Lady and Gentleman in Black’ for Rembrandt and moves on to consider a pair of Degas paintings, yet more Rembrandt, Manet, Vermeer etc. Recorded live, here is the suite in its entirety and quite an undertaking it is. The ability of a composition and instrumentation of this nature to evoke a visual image may be questionable so it's the composer's responses and these outcomes that we're judging.

It's no surprise, then, that ‘Cortege Aux Environs Do Florence’ (Degas) should receive an elegiac treatment, over a stuttering drum pattern whereas ‘Program for an Artistic Soiree’ (also Degas) is rather more spirited with brilliant improvisations by Palmer and the excellent Ross, the writing quite skeletal. Otherwise, much here is relatively restrained in both the intention and its realisation. Palmer tackles each harmonic hurdle carefully, the mood conversational at times, as Turner does much the same in his thoughtful manner, although he's more impassioned on ‘Landscape with an Obelisk’ (Flinck). There's nothing wayward or ill-considered here – certainly no swing, more a sense of something carefully considered and executed.