CD: Steve Kuhn with Strings, Promises Kept

Now 66, Steve Kuhn has been playing some of the freshest piano-trio jazz of his career for the Reservoir label in recent years. But he has chosen to suspend all of that for this ECM contemporary-classical session of minimal pianism and improvisation and romantic string-section exhalations.

One or two of the tracks have a waltzing, trancelike, Nino Rota glimmer to them, but the slow tempos and thematic similarities make the enterprise something of a sleepwalk. Kuhn's broken-chord left-hand countermelodies to his water-drip themes are repetitive, and only a moment or two of agitated pizzicato strings and dark arco-bass sounds suggest the bolder venture that might have been.