Julie Sassoon, Inside Colours Live, Jazzwerkstatt ***1/2

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Spread over two CDs these avant flavoured Inside Colours duo and trio settings are the work firstly of Germany based English pianist Julie Sassoon of the early 21st century trio Azilut with her partner German reedist Lothar Ohlmeier and secondly the pairing joined by their now 19-year-old daughter, drummer Mia Ohlmeier.

Julie Sassoon, Lothar Ohlmeier photo: Andreas Daschner

'To Be'

Part of the release is a Bayerischer Rundfunk (Bavarian Radio) recording issued by Berlin label Jazzwerkstatt. But the main talking point is that the second CD recorded in the Chamber Music Hall of the Berlin Philharmonie includes the presence of Mia who clearly is already a sensational jazz musician improviser - hear her best on the trio version of 'Land of Shadows'. The drummer's playing seems to us to be as intuitive as freedom inclined players such as the great drummer-percussionist Paul Clarvis, heard most recently on Rob Cope's Gemini.

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Mia Ohlmeier, photo: Cristina Marx

'Land of Shadows' is a Sassoon piece that has become one of the most notable compositions in the Manchester born pianist's repertoire. Also the title of a 2013 issued recording that John Fordham in The Guardian reviewing the record at the time said was ''a journey back through the 1930s German-Jewish history her family had barely been able to discuss… Julie Sassoon consistently makes the piano, her voice and her deepest emotions sound awesomely and naturally inseparable.''

For his part Ohlmeier plays tenor and soprano saxes & bass clarinet - his style on the latter darkly compelling reed instrument draws to mind the declarative manner of French master Louis Sclavis at his most robust.

The duo recordings were made at various festivals in Europe including outdoors in the eastern Bavarian city of Regensburg during July 2016, Roland Spiegel of Bayerischer Rundfunk explaining that since 2016, several recordings have been made of the Inside Colours duo for BR-Klassik. ''Here,'' Spiegel notes. ''you can hear pieces from that earlier open-air jazz festival concert as well as others from the pandemic year 2022 in a smaller Regensburg venue.''

Sassoon compositions such as 'Shifting' that have also appeared on 2021's weighty and very satisfying differently configured quartet recording Voyages are reprised. To the Power of Three's 'Coming Home' and the meisterwerk 'Land of Shadows' referred to three paragraphs earlier appear in both duo and trio versions - the trio one certainly capturing a remarkably fresh, vibrantly expressed and well worth full immersion in set of moments in time. Inside Colours Live cover art detail, top

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Gary Husband, photo: Leonardo Pavkovic

I was keen to do a project turning my musical hand to some timeless old material and conveying some of it in my kind of way. Since I took some heavy personal loss in recent years, I really felt in a place where I needed to make an album of this kind. It’s one I experienced tremendous cathartic value making. In a big way, it’s my “blue” album.

– Gary Husband

The piano playing side of Englishman Gary Husband in focus. Known for his work with fellow northerner jazz icon John McLaughlin and the Panama born US drum great Billy Cobham, Husband is just as formidable a pianist as he is a very happening jazz-rock fusion drummer. On this gentle and loving album of instrumentals illuminated most of all by a Husband arrangement and performance of Bill Evans' 'My Bells' that the Mahavishnu himself McLaughlin had also interpreted on his early-1990s Time Remembered explorations in Evansiana. Husband's opening foray into the piece makes us think more directly than in McLaughlin's version (although the feeling is still there) in the mind's ear of the famous theme of Prokofiev's 'Troika' for the 1930s film Lieutenant Kijé.

The Wall Street Journal journalist Marc Myers writing on Jazzwax notes that Evans' 'My Bells' was ''based on his chord responses played on 'So What' for Miles Davis' Kind of Blue,'' and that ''the song was a beautiful expression that became lush and pensive once it was arranged by Claus Ogerman for Bill Evans Trio with Symphony Orchestra in 1965.''

All the Songs of Love and Solace pieces are kept brief and radio friendly length-wise. Only Johnny Mandel and Paul Williams' 'Close Enough For Love' and the opener 'If I Should Lose You,' clock in at longer than 5 minutes each. McLaughlin himself has heard the treatment of the latter, the Leo Robin and Ralph Rainger ballad, and has commented addressing ''Brother Gary'' directly: ''You are taking contemporary romanticism into another realm of harmonic extension without losing the essential romanticism that can never be replaced by abstractionism.'' How true.

Julie Sassoon, Inside Colours Live, Jazzwerkstatt ***1/2

Gary Husband, Songs of Love and Solace ****