Released at the peak of the bossa-nova boom of the early 1960s, on the face of it this album might initially have looked like some sort of cash-in. Its late-night mood of soft tick-tick-tick rhythms and inclusion of Luiz Bonfa’s Brazilian anthem ‘Black Orpheus’, certainly suggest strong links with the contemporary work of Mulligan’s fellow cool school maven Stan Getz, as indeed does the personnel.

Yet the baritonist’s musical vision was always one equally driven by composition and arrangement as much as by improvisation making this utterly charming record one full of both personal tonal texture and signature soloing. It’s also an album of subtlety within subtlety, contriving somehow to find a link between Chopin (‘Prelude in E Minor’) and present day jazz fashion (the almost Bill Evans-like title track). All hands play with apposite restraint, Brookmeyer and Farmer the ultimate front-line foils for the leader and Jim Hall proving once more to be the most unobtrusive of accompanists. Beside him Mulligan regulars Crow and Bailey provide the discreetest of beats.

Quite why this album hasn’t been afforded the cult status of similar ‘after hours’ recitals of the same vintage – Grant Green’s Idle Moments, Kenny Burrell’s Midnight Blue to name but two – isn’t clear; it definitely deserves to be better known. This issue, available exclusively on the millennial bait of vinyl, ticks all the boxes, right down to a new sleeve note from Bill Crow. As a bonus they’ve even thrown in a further take of the title track made by Mulligan and strings a couple of years later. It’s lovely but it belongs in another time and place. The original album is so perfectly weighted that to add anything at all is to unbalance the whole. Beautiful, lyrical and heartbreaking in parts, only the stone-faced could fail to fall in love with this. Highly recommended.