Currently the no. 1 selling jazz and blues album in the UK arriving not long after the excellent Love in Exile which we reckoned was one of last year's best releases in jazz - although some papers like The Guardian bracket it absurdly under the term ''global'', the great jazz pianist and improviser Vijay Iyer again is significant as a collaborator with the 39-year-old New York based Pakistani-American singer Arooj Aftab who first surfaced a decade ago with Bird Under Water. Themed around all things nocturnal the album has a restless stylistic spread and allows room for acoustic guitar from Kaki King and Gyan Riley and who can resist the harp stylings. ''If you allow yourself to be in the night it can be an extremely joyous place where you're out until six in the morning or it can be when you rest. All these nine songs are somehow different phases of the night," Aftab told Reuters recently. The version of jazz standard 'Autumn Leaves' left us cold but we much preferred the presence of Moor Mother and Joel Ross on 'Bolo Na' and best of all Iyer's wonderful presence on the evanescent 'Saaqi'. A future fully conceived and explored duo album with Iyer would make perfect sense - Aftab plays Glastonbury later this month. Arooj Aftab, photo: Shreya Dev Dube