Dave Stapleton: Quiet Fire

Fourteen years on from the previous album under his own name, the music world is a different place, and indeed, Dave Stapleton is a very different musician. While his distinct ear for melody is recognizable, this affair is a world away from 2012's Flight (Edition). The pianist's breakthrough-at-the-time solo outing was an ambitious and expansive chamber-jazz affair crossing acoustic combo with string quartet. The feeling here is likewise evocative and picturesque, but on a more introspective and intimate scale.

Stapleton has not by any stretch been on retreat in the meantime; the gap has been well-filled by running the Edition Records label and leading the electro-trip-jazz outfit Slowly Rolling Camera, crossed with some further production duties and photography and visual arts on the side. SRC listeners will notice plenty of overlap with Quiet Fire: besides reworking a previously vocalized track from its self-titled debut (Edition, 2014) into something livelier and dreamier, this session shares some of that band's shuffling quasi-rave grooves, and he does enjoy taking a chord sequence catchily sideways. Of course, Stapleton also takes the chance to wander down a few quieter electronic alleys at the same time.

Free to play in the studio's sandbox of construction and layering, he skips among a battery of electric keyboards like a kid in a candy store (or rather the back storeroom of an instrument shop). Jon Goode and Elliot Bennett spin a skittery drum-n- bass foundation throughout, sometimes building to a crazy sprint or subsiding for the odd slowburn, but most often simply making sure the fire is smoldering. While Stapleton's keys float and ring through space, a rotation of horns and guitar broadens the sweep with further enticing hooks and textures. The collage is trip-tastic and yet warm and cozy, a flight of imagination particularly suited to the dim-lit glow of night.

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