Unlikely bedfellows

Some amalgam this, but Glasper moves between the sounds of Erykah Badu and Me'shell Ndegeocello and the jazz vision of hornmen such as Terence Blanchard or Charles Tolliver and his big band.

In My Element reveals Glasper's own very particular artistry expressed through a piano trio, with drummer Damion Reid and Vicente Archer on bass. As veteran pianist Mulgrew Miller reminds us on the albums sleeve, "Other than solo piano, the trio is the ultimate context for the pianist's total expression. The trio is sympathetic to his vision and rich imagination and is able to perform exactly within that vision. He's then able to execute anything that he imagines."

With Reid's fluttering cymbals and airy drums and Archer's juggling heartbeat, Glasper's opener G'n'B sounds like no other piano.

Lightweight, moveable, almost feathery, his notes dance and float as if they were borne on blown breath.

He traverses the keyboard as if he is hardly touching each key, as if it is his sheer imagination pressing out the music.

When he enters the melody of Sam Rivers's Beatrice, it seems like a close and intimate place where he has lived for years. Archer's bass takes depth and fire with Reid's splashing cymbals and, as Glasper pulls out his power, he reinvents Rivers's journey with new dimensions of sonic beauty.

Something similar happens to Herbie Hancock's 1965 Maiden Voyage, but, somewhere into its movement, it becomes Radiohead's Everything In It's Right Place and two eras are meshed.

Artist in Residence is New York pianist Jason Moran's seventh album for Blue Note. With just over 30 years behind him, this is some precocious canon, but every new album reflects new ground.

This new one radiates his time (2004-5) as Artist in Residence at Minneapolis's Walker Art Centre, when he worked with artist and author Adrian Piper, whose chant underlines the opening track Break Down.

"Break down the barriers," she chants. "Break down the art world" and "the general public, the artists, presuppositions, intentions and misunderstandings," while Moran, bassist Tarus Mateen, drummer Nasheet Waits and guitarist Marvin Sewell accompany her.

Cradle Song remembers Moran's piano lessons when his mother used to sit in and take notes as he played. He remembers that "the loud sound of her pencil scratching against paper accompanied much of my early years at the piano. This song is in honour of her memory as much as it is my answer to Adrian Piper's directive that 'artists ought to be writing'."

And Moran's solo reflection of that theme follows, while his mother's memory is still shining from his keys.

Refraction 1 follows, accompanied by Joan Jonas's percussive sounds of bells, shakers, claves and toy car, succeeded by Arizona Landscape and RAIN, when trumpeter Ralph Alessi plays a "ring shout" described by Moran in his notes as a "counterclockwise dance" from African-American slave culture, featuring percussive stick-beating and hand-clapping with call and response singing, all enhanced by Abdou Mboup's adjembe, kora and talking drum.

Sewell and Moran interweave on a powerful rendition of the black "national anthem" Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing, with Mateen and Waits blending dedicated rhythmic support and direction. Sewell's strings wail bluesily, giving the testimony of a struggling history.

The final, lingering track is Moran's solo. He puts on his hat and leaves, a sauntering, meandering stroll that tells, quite incontrovertibly, that he'll be back soon.

CHRIS SEARLE