Aaron Diehl, the award-engulfed pianist and composer from Ohio, is the kind of jazz artist who coaxes grateful smiles from those fans who fear the music’s great traditions are under siege from fads and fashions. Rather unsurprisingly, the 34 year-old virtuoso is a Wynton Marsalis favourite, and he was also a key member of the debut band of another gifted young defender of old faiths, the vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant. But as he proved with his last album for Mack Avenue – 2015’s Space Time Continuum, on which Benny Golson and the late Joe Temperley memorably guested – Diehl is no fogeyish diehard; rather, he is an impartially sophisticated contemporary musician with a flawless touch and a respect for the past that doesn’t banish deviations. On this fine and idiomatically-intriguing trio album with bassist Paul Sikivia and drummer Gregory Hutchinson, he subtly salutes two pieces by jazz piano legends John Lewis (the MJQ’s 1955 ballad-to-stride release, ‘Milano’) and Sir Roland Hanna (‘A Story Often Told, Seldom Heard’), plays a staccato, swerving account of a Prokofiev march and a chiming Philip Glass minimalist étude, alongside seven originals taking in the restrained, delicately soft-struck and rather MJQ-like ‘Polaris’, the springy, casually arpeggio-strewn ‘Magnanimous Disguise’, and the distantly-baroque piano-bass counterpoint of the title track. Sikivia and Hutchinson attentively deliver the texturally sensitive, close-listening accompaniment this music requires. Aaron Diehl has taken five years to release his third album as a leader, but the deep reflection behind The Vagabond is unmistakeable.