In dreams - if you dream music rather than pictorial imagery and we often do - the soundtrack which is always an abstraction and mysterious is something ideally like Once Around the Room: A Tribute to Paul Motian. Collectively a septet - all the players are leaders of an illustrious nature 5 flying in to Copenhagen from all over - Paris, London, New York, Switzerland and Berlin - for the recording led by the powerhouse US saxophonist Joe Lovano here ostensibly at high avant-garde altitude and by the New Cool School Danish guitar master of Friselliana, Jakob Bro. Both former bandmates of Paul Motian (1931-2011) Lovano is on tenor and tarogato. Other album personnel are double bassists Larry Grenadier and Thomas Morgan, bass guitarist Anders Christensen, drummers Joey Baron and Jorge Rossy. Quiet but extremely intense compositions are by Lo and Bro interspersed with Motian originals that include 'Drum Music'. An album that has momentousness throughout special moments include the time and way that Bro gently guides us into 'Song To An Old Friend'. A balladic mood can be many things and even an elegy which we see this track as and can be all embracingly multi-faceted. So it could be to lost time together, perhaps sadness, perhaps even the loss of contact and such elegiac writing can be devastatingly bleak or just as easily ethereal. And that latter characteristic describes the shadowing of guitar and saxophone that finds Lovano quite Andy Sheppard-like on this track. By contrast he is blisteringly himself on Lo's own 12-tone piece 'As It Should Be' which is superbly anarchic and real and smashes any complacency through this no-nonsence abnegation of ego in pursuit of building through the in-the-moment improvisational spirit an enduring obelisk to Motian of delicate design and beautiful complexity.