Beginning any album with a ballad is a sign of unerring confidence but also possesses a certain knowingness that only maturity as well as trial and error over the course of a number of albums can put in place. Magnifying that and painting everything in balladry is a leap of faith.

After ‘Heart in Hand’, however, the first of these six longish tracks part of a knottily absorbing quartet affair that was recorded in June last year in the welcoming fold of Avatar studios in New York it is a riddle to know where the direction can go because such a build-up of pent up emotion is captured and not completely let ever escape.

At a time when regular jazz listeners are often abandoning the discipline of listening to albums in their entirety preferring instead the relative brevity of a single track, it is fairly easy to decide that the eight minutes and nineteen seconds of the opener is more than enough musical nourishment to last days, even weeks. Certainly there is an extraordinary intensity provided on this one track that your off the peg jazz ballad treatment bathed in typically overwrought one-size-fits-all sentimentality might very well lack. Potter has gone in incredibly deeply that’s for sure and his is a compelling vision far from the greeting card sentiments of any pop song that you might hear on the radio.

David Virelles on piano, often heard on ECM albums in recent years, Joe Martin on bass and Marcus Gilmore on drums often shrink away behind the forceful saxophone presence. That reduction in the band role is perhaps unavoidable when the monstrously accomplished abilities of Potter are so significantly on display. A more telling criticism relating to the tunes themselves is that they struggle for immediate likeability. An album you cannot comfortably live in for too long without the need to come up for much needed gulps of air The Dreamer Is The Dream is easy to admire but proves much more difficult to truly fall head over heels in love with. SG