In the sleeve notes the Doncasterborn, New York-resident pianist John Escreet describes how his most recent mentor and now closest collaborator, saxophonist-composer David Binney told him to cut out all the practised or learned stuff such as the Herbie licks he was still falling back on occasionally. Escreet has followed an exploratory path ever since arriving in New York and studying for his masters with Kenny Barron and then Jason Moran at the Manhattan Music School from which he graduated in 2008. This is his fourth album as leader and the finger-on-thepulse unpredictability of his previous albums always makes a new one an intriguing prospect. On Exception to the Rule we can hear everything from intricate, zigzagging rhythms and riffs, odd metric cycles that recall Vijay Iyer and Rudresh Mahanthappa, through to late-period feverish modal Trane, and arcane classical neoimpressionist soundscapes. Nowadays his spectrum of influence is as wide as his imagination, from Kenny Kirkland to Andrew Hill and Cecil Taylor through to hip hop producer J Dilla. Whereas Escreet's previous album The Age We Live In had a jazz-rock edge by virtue of guitarist Wayne Krantz's contribution, this one features more electronica (courtesy of David Binney) that's mostly on the ambient side, than previously. Escreet's restless balancing act between the cerebral and the intuitive comes with a complexity that makes this one of his harder albums to get to grips with. But it's the kind of challenge that specialist left-field listeners are likely to appreciate.