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Alcyona

Around the Sun

Audio-B ABCD 5018

Despite discarding her surname (Mick), Alcyona has retained her trademark piano style: idiosyncratic, painstaking, imbued with the sort of rhythmic and harmonic quirkiness that audibly draws on the work of such past masters as Thelonious Monk and Wayne Shorter, but ultimately renders her compositions distinctive.

The debt to Monk is made overt in pieces such as 'Monkey', full of subtly displaced emphases and odd melodic twists, and the Shorter influence can be heard more subliminally, in the hovering, brooding quality of some of her material; overall, though, Alcyona is a genuine original, her piano playing eschewing dazzling runs and stormy percussiveness but concentrating instead on the unhurried selection of the most unusual routes through chord sequences (the slowly creeping 'Marigold' a particularly good example), or (on her two improvised solo pieces) the creation of a mood courtesy of the repeated examination of particular figures.

Her band, fronted by trumpeter Robbie Robson and tenorman Mark Hanslip, likewise avoid facile grandstanding in favour of sensitive, thoughtful contributions to the group sound, and with Phil Donkin and either Asaf Sirkis or John Blease driving proceedings along with their customary tastefully restrained brio, this is an album to savour slowly, one that richly rewards sustained careful attention.