You know Steve Lodder. You know his work, anyway. The pianist and keyboardist has fruitfully combined his musical talents with those of Andy Sheppard, not to mention John Etheridge and Sarah Jane Morris, and toured with Carla Bley and Steve Swallow. He's recorded with Elvis Costello, and co-founded the Zappatistas. His collaborative work is well known, then. On … Tied Up with Strings, however, he stands – or rather sits – alone, restricting his arrangements to solo piano (with one exception) as he explores disparate favourites drawn from the Renaissance, the Baroque and modern soul, as well as original compositions. Thus, Lodder invites the listener to share a super-catholic leap of faith with him as he passes from the diamond precision of the second movement of J.S. Bach's ‘Italian Concerto’ to the dewy sentimentality of the Motown classic ‘What Becomes of the Broken Hearted?’ via the scrabbling ascents of the first of two improvs, ‘Madeup2’ (‘Madeup1’ follows later in the programme, naturally). He's a fine pianist and just about gets away with such reckless eclecticism. He even pretends to have four pairs of hands (the miracle of overdubbing) on the closer ‘Resolve for Joanna’, named for British concert pianist Joanna MacGregor and written for students to perform.