'Opals' is the lead-off track from Shirley Smart and Robert Mitchell's Zeitgeist² streaming ahead of the album's 28 January release. Highly melodic and lightly elegiac there is a lot going on over its 6-minute duration with a firm if controlled improvisational feel as well as a rhapsodic sense that spools beyond any narrow genre sense and certainly could appeal to classical listeners as well as jazz appreciators. The overall effect is rather beautiful enhanced by the recording's very warmly recorded sonic vaues especially the way the piano sound is captured. Other album tracks are 'The First Note,' 'Anxieties,' 'Zeitgeist,' 'Klavierstück in A,' 'For Catherine,' 'Inner Sanctum,' 'A Son of Windrush Reflects' and 'Mind's Eye'.

The Zeitgeist² version is a slightly longer and more intense treatment of 'Opals' in a new arrangement of the Smart piece that has appeared on the cellist-composer's 2018 trio album Long Story Short – that version beginning with a percussive flourish, for instance. Hear Smart and Mitchell at the Vortex on 20 January.