This week's Jazz CDs reviewed

ANDY PANAYI

The Solar Cats Woodville ***

Probably because he spreads himself over such a wide range of musical idioms, multi-instrumentalist Andy Panayi gets less recognition than is his due. But his splendid quartet, with Mark Nightingale (trombone), Simon Woolf (bass) and Steve Brown (drums), has evolved over 15 years from an ebullient echo of the Mulligan-Brookmeyer group into a group which, with this release, has clearly found its own mainstream- bop voice. Panayi wrote most of the music, including a nine-part Planets Suite, making inventive use of the band’s resources, among them Brown’s beautifully textured drumming, and blending his own tenor, flute and baritone with trombone or bass in unison or contrapuntal lines. The band handles the idiosyncratically distinctive writing with impressive aplomb, and in Nightingale it has one of the greatest trombonists in any jazz idiom anywhere. www.propernote. co.uk

JACK WILKINS

Until It's Time MaxJazz ****

Despite decades at the top table (Mingus, The Breckers, Buddy Rich, Phil Woods), Wilkins is another gifted player who gets less than his due. Yet he's one of the great mainstream guitarists, with abundant ideas, awesome technique and compulsive swing. Reinforcing those qualities, on a blowing session into which much thought has clearly gone, is a crisply powerful John Cowherd- Steve LaSpina-Mark Ferber rhythm section. The shrewdly chosen repertoire is transformed; from the potentially unpromising Show Meand Für Elise(!), to Rollins's Airegin, a Tico Ticotaken far faster than Grant Green's, Johnny Smith's Walk Don't Run(with a nice touch of homage) and pieces by Bacharach, James Taylor, Mancini and Buffy Sainte-Marie, for example. And, sparked by the guitarist's brio, they're all carried off with a communal joy in playing that's irresistible. www.maxjazz.com

JON BALKE – AMINA ALAOUI

Siwan ECM *****

This melding of early Baroque, Andalusian music influenced by the culture of Moorish Spain, and jazz, is astonishing in its emotional and spiritual power and in its sheer wholeness. Siwan is a collaboration between Norwegian pianist-composer Balke and the great Moroccan singer Alaoui,with Kheir Eddine M'Kachciche, a virtuoso violinist schooled in Arab-Andalusian music, violinist Bjarte Eike's superb early music ensemble, Barokksolistene, and guest soloist trumpeter John Hassell. In drawing on the work of Spain's Arab poets, as well as Sufi and Christian mystics, the music makes the same emotional and intellectual journeys its multicultural lyrics ask of it. Yet it does this not by synthesis; just as the writer Aldous Huxley showed in his Perennial Philosophythat mystics of all creeds had a greater common ground, so Balke, Alaoui and the rest have found theirs in music. One of the CDs of the year.