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This delightfully wide-ranging jazz quintet album from Kenny Barron opens with a delicate reading of Washington and Carmichael’s “The Nearness of You” and closes with a brisk sax and piano duet cover of Thelonious Monk’s “We See”. There is a nod to the Jazz Messengers with drummer Jonathan Blake’s composition “Blues on Stratford Road”, and drums and piano rampage through an unusually taut duet version of “Softly as in a Morning Sunrise”.
But the body of the album, and indeed its subtle emotional range, comes from the five Barron originals that span the breadth of the pianist’s 50-plus-year career. “Sunset”, released on Muse in 1973, was the first track on Barron’s debut solo album Sunset to Dawn. Back then it was interpreted through swirls of resonant Fender Rhodes, but here an acoustic band get to the essence of the tune’s prowling melody and sinuous left-hand groove…

Sambao is Kenny Barron's tribute to Brazilian music done his way. These original compositions by the peerless pianist combine jazz and samba in a modernistic way, with no copying of tunes from the master Antonio Carlos Jobim, and no hint of the populist Stan Getz approach due to the lack of a lead instrument, save Barron's attractive and inventive piano. He's accompanied by heavyweights of the Rio-cum-New York City scene, including guitarist Toninho Horta, bassist Nico Assumpção, and French-born percussionist Mino Cinelu. Barron's (and most people's) favorite jazz drummer Victor Lewis is included, reinforcing the rhythms expertly as usual.

Pianist and composer Kenny Barron, a towering figure in the jazz world with 13 Grammy nominations and induction into the American Jazz Hall of Fame, has been at the helm of sophisticated post-bop for many decades, never shying away from reinventing jazz standards, reshaping his own originals, or composing anew. He does all that in his latest album, Beyond This Place, for which he enlisted a multigenerational group featuring rising star saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins, veteran vibraphonist Steve Nelson, and his regular rhythm team of bassist Kiyoshi Kitagawa and drummer Johnathan Blake.