You could boil everything on Resonance down to strings, piano and drums. If you did what would be left to simmer?

Well, probably the general mood, a plangent questioning stillness, the tonality verging on atonality but never totally tipping over, a melancholia perhaps but not overwhelming in its bleakness.

Danish pianist Jacob Anderskov begins this studio album – recorded in Copenhagen earlier this year and which is now gaining a UK CD physical release a few months after it first came out – with a tribute to Ornette Coleman by choosing to arrange Science Fiction’s ‘What Reason Could I Give’. Anderskov then resumes for the duration with his own compositions and that element is the most interesting thing here, the way the pianist (whose improvising style is to paraphase decoratively and to rhapsodise) harnesses his easy virtuosity with his classically grounded ideas in his writing to communicate and achieve a better sense of overall artistry.

Peter Bruun, who first surfaced in front of British audiences in Django Bates’ Charlie Parker tribute band Belovèd Bird, is the drummer here and thrives on the openness that not having a bassist to contend with allows. The deepest parts of the cello are no subsitute nor is the role in any case as the strings trio act as one instrument, intrinsic in the lushness of the triad and chordal layering. The harmonies are more like Schoenberg and serialist in their chromaticism particularly than Bill Evans’ equally modern sense of modality which you can see sometimes in Anderskov’s mind’s eye. But this is a jazz album as much as it is a classically grounded work and even contains a few folky touches. Yes, that is all possible and worthwhile and is not as obliquely jarring as such an accommodation can be in lesser hands than Anderskov’s. Stephen Graham