Brad Mehldau, Chris Potter, John Patitucci, Brian Blade. Photo: via Edition

Gold blend: An eight tracker of considerable weight and grace. The main talking point here is the presence of pianist Brad Mehldau who appears on issuing label Edition for the first time. The Wayne Shorter Quartet's John Patitucci, touring with another Wayne alumnus the great ''PanaMonkian'' Danilo Pérez to Sweden this month and Wayne drummer Brian Blade complete the rhythm section with Brad, playing leader-reedist Chris Potter's tunes. 'Málaga Moon' is for Patitucci fans the track to go for. But to be honest the double bassist is important throughout Eagle's Point, an album that's all about group play. The band as an instrument is the thing itself. And you get a strong sense of the organic osmosis involved in composition transformed by performance and captured in vivid sonic detail as the icing on the cake.

Nifty 90s: Mehldau worked with Potter way back and appeared on the saxist's 1996 Concord swinging hard Moving In recorded in New York. The way Mehldau opens 'Chorale' on that 90s album for instance makes sense to listen to again for some inkling of how the two used to play together at that time and more to the point is somehow most pertinent to the spirit of the new music. For Mehldau and Blade also together in the 90s you need to go hear the classic MoodSwing (1994) they were on with Joshua Redman and Christian McBride, a band that has reunited in recent years and best heard on Long Gone's 'Disco Ears.' There's good detail on 90s Mehldau in his memoir Formation published last year.

Whole lotta love: All the pieces on this latest album out today grounded in such remarkable cadential and harmonic resourcefulness, a studios album recorded in the States, are Potter originals who proves once again a strong highly romantic writer. Potter chooses among his arsenal to play tenor & soprano saxophones plus bass clarinet. 'Indigo Ildikó' is where the Got the Keys to the Kingdom ace Potters up for a cappella bass clarinet at the outset. The Steely Dan alumnus has produced the album in collaboration with Dave Holland's daughter and manager, Louise. The most moving tune is 'Other Plans' when Brad is at his most rhapsodic. Moving because it's the sort of tune that you might find ideal for a situation when you feel hurt and you want to save face and there's nothing doing in your world. You mutter you have ''other plans'' rather than explain what's wrong. It's a tune to put on to give you comfort when all you want to do is simply disappear. What Potter meant when he decided on the name would be great to know. But while serious and at times humanely deep, Eagle's Point contains a lot of love regardless of the different means of expressing the emotion and the array of interpretations possible when a successful creative work is set loose into the world. A golden positivity is also most obviously exemplified by the calypso feel of the head bobbing 'Horizon Dance.'