It’s 10 years since classically-trained piano virtuoso Bill Laurance stepped out from the long (rather funky) shadow of Snarky Puppy to explore his own vision of what contemporary, jazz-fuelled, music can sound like. His 2014 debut solo album, Flint, was bursting with urgently emotive melodies, punchy contrapuntal rhythms, and indeed, strings. Now with a discography spanning 12 albums and EPs ranging from solo piano, experimental electronica, and synthy-fusion, to fully blown orchestral live recordings, ‘prolific’ is a bit of an understatement for Laurance, especially as he’s also clocked up 20 years of recording and performing with Snarky Puppy.

Thus we arrive in the present and a new era with ACT Music – the label on which Laurance released the universally praised Where You Wish You Were duo set with fellow Snarky founder Michael League. The latter album revelled in acoustic purity and spacious melodicism and that pristine aesthetic continues here with Manchester’s Untold Orchestra – an ensemble that has something of a symbiotic understanding of the pianist’s dancing rhythmic language and overlapping phrases – they wrap themselves around every pianistic phrase. Drum-less yet grooving heavily throughout, Laurance’s lithe piano solos break things up and retain an improvised edge on what is a highly composed, expertly controlled suite with melody and groove teased out to an epic scale. Cinematic yet intimately detailed (and beautifully recorded and mixed), Bloom triumphs as a soundtrack to an invisible film – where it sits stylistically is in the ear of the beholder.