Featuring compositions written by the multi-award winning pianist plus music by Duke Ellington, Jessica Williams and Rabindranath Tagore, Zoe Rahman has recorded and toured widely in recent years with saxophonist Courtney Pine. 

That’s where some of her best recent work is found eclipsed only by her beautiful album Kindred Spirits four years back on which she made full sense of all her many influences again with a reeds player as a foil, in that case mainly her brother Idris. 

While Dreamland is consummately tasteful, it would have been a shock if it hadn’t been given Rahman’s magically alert style, the great thing about her playing is her composure and naturalness. And yet the elegance is a little too restrictive, the starkness of solo piano not suiting her as well as group situations, the album crying out for her to let herself go a little more rather than retreat into oblique reverie. 

Stephen Graham