Some day in the future, a keen scholar of the music will write a fabulous PhD about all of the music that was released which was prompted by the pandemic. It’s an ever-growing list to which Songs From Other Places can now be added.

The album is bookended by a brace of songs that Kent first recorded on her excellent (and Grammy-nominated) 2007 Blue Note album, Breakfast On The Morning Tram, namely the scene-setting, Tomlinson/Ishiguro-penned ‘I Wish I Could Go Travelling Again’, and an exquisite take on Stevie Nicks’ ‘Landslide’. Exploring themes of belonging, connection and wanderlust, and accompanied throughout by the excellent NYC-based pianist (and long-standing friend), Art Hirahara, Kent channels the bittersweet beauty of Jobim’s ‘Bonita’, gently caresses the lyrics of Quebecois singer-songwriter Raymond Lévesque’s ‘Les Voyages’, and delivers the hymnic ‘American Tune’ with a moving simplicity.

The album also presents two freshly minted songs penned by Tomlinson and Ishiguro, the atmospheric tableaux of ‘Craigie Burn’ and the evocative power and metrical shifts of ‘Tango In Macao’. Fans of Kent singing the Great American Songbook should head straight for the intimate, pellucid soundworld of the Weill–Gershwin classic, ‘My Ship’.