The New York-based clarinetist Anat Cohen is not nearly well-enough known in Europe, although she is already a major star in the US. This album, exploring connections with Brazilian music with the virtuoso seven-string guitarist Marcello Gonçalves, is an unalloyed pleasure. The opening ‘Reconvexo’ in which she not only works brilliantly with the guitar but double tracks on clarinet and bass clarinet is a tour-de-force and the album continues in the same vein. The delicately paced ‘Anima’ allows her to explore the softer timbres of her instrument, yet occasionally steps up the pace to exchange punchy phrases with Gonçalves. They are so much on the same wavelength that the album becomes a joy, hearing two musicians completely in accord with one another. The Latin focus of the album is contrasted by a really creative reading of Stevie Wonder’s ‘Never Dreamed You’d Leave In Summer’, where the emotional peaks and troughs are wrapped in sensitive musical tissue paper.

By contrast, the terpsichorean Brazilian piece ‘Il Diablo Suelto’ suggests aural images of dancers tripping the light fantastic to the musical fantasia they conjure up. Caetano Veloso, Milton Nascimento and Gilberto Gil all celebrate their 80th birthdays this year, and this album is a joyous, exuberant yet deliberately understated tribute to their musical legacy.