Atlantic Jazz Collective, Seascape, Alma ****

Another album that lands inescapably in the Wheelerian universe – there has been a flood of such albums since the autumn including most memorably Some Days Are Better that featured Norma Winstone.

The core of the Atlantic Jazz Collective emanates from Canada. The piano lines from Canada resident German jazzer Florian Hoefner are a strong plus factor notable for their easy grasp of texture, feeling and taste. The bassist Jim Vivian like Winstone recorded with Wheeler who was born in Canada although he lived in England for most of his life. And you get that feeling of homeland strongly in the way Vivian is yes so vivid in his contributions.

Vivian was on the Kenny and Sonny Live at the Montreal Bistro Wheeler and Sonny Greenwich Quintet live album (Justin Time, 1997) which also had fast forward to Seascape the album’s drummer Joe LaBarbera on it on Wheeler’s ‘Gentle Piece.’

‘Raffish’ – already issued as a single – was on 2001 Towner album Anthem.

Overall I find Seascape even more satisfying than the guitar flavoured Jason Keiser gem Kind of Kenny issued last year and is up there with Winstone’s own magical Wheeler With Words perhaps to some long time followers her best work since her stirring collaborations with Gesing and Venier on their classic Stories Yet To Tell (2010).

Spend time rewardingly with Stories Yet to Tell track ‘Just Sometimes.’

As a lyricist Winstone, now 83, is heavily influenced by Stevie Smith and in both Smith and Winstone’s work you get the sense of some of the same tragicomic elements and calibrated melodrama borne by the buffeting of life’s crosswinds and delicately explored.

But that’s only part of her lyric writing – she is good too at conveying the disappointments of love and its power even more than Smith through the magnetism of her singing voice. Smith sang too but was no match to Winstone. She achieves a kind of secular salvation on so many songs here.

Hoeffner does not sound that much like Fred Hersch who is the pianist most suitable for Winstone since the days of Azimuth. But he is closer to John Taylor’s approach than Hersch is somehow. And yet the main focus irrespective of the sensitivity of accompaniment is voice delicately framed.

Seascape was recorded in Canada in the city of St. John’s, Newfoundland the closest major port to the wreck of the Titanic.

Winstone says: “I met Mike Murley and Jim Vivian when Kenny Wheeler, John Taylor and I recorded with The Maritime Jazz Orchestra many years ago.”

She adds referring to La Barbera that she had met him ”some years ago in Canada and subsequently recorded with for my album Well Kept Secret with Jimmy Rowles.”

Winstone’s greatest work as a lyricist is contained on that album with her setting of Rowles’ ‘The Peacocks’ that has since become a much covered standard among singers known as ‘A Timeless Place.’

A word on Hoefner who contributes a good deal to the mood of the album. Brought up in Bavaria, he studied at the University of Arts in Berlin, won a Fulbright Scholarship to study at the Manhattan School of Music and now lives in St. John’s teaching at Memorial University.

His albums include 2022’s Desert Bloom.

Other tracks here in addition to the pieces already referred to are ‘Distant Star,’ ‘Where Do We Go From Here,’ ‘Turn Again,’ ‘Always By Your Side,’ ‘Trying to Recall,’ ‘Running Through My Head’ and ‘This Is New.’

Highlights of Seascape include Winstone’s vocal and setting of a Maria Schneider piece found on ‘Distant Star’ and the sax playing from Murley on Taylor piece ‘Where Do We Go From Here?’ a piece that was on the CAM Jazz album of the same name featuring Wheeler recorded 21 years ago.