Sometimes it's a little crooked, shrill or dazzling, but above all it's fresh: the album Gifts by Japanese-born Makiko Hirabayashi interweaves themes by, for example, George Frideric Handel with jazz. She is supported in this handiwork by the Danish trio Weavers. With so much internationality, it can only be good. Or can it?

Pianist Hirabayashi was born in Tokyo and grew up partly in Hong Kong. She studied classical music at Berklee and discovered jazz there. She has lived in Copenhagen since 1990. On Gifts, she mixes jazz as a pianist and composer with works that have accompanied, challenged and helped her grow in her musical development.

The melange of inspiration and arrangement is captivating, especially as the quartet of Hirabayashi, saxophonist Fredrik Lundin, bassist Thommy Anderson and drummer Bjørn Heebøll take up the challenge in a very musical way and shape the nine pieces with a great deal of emotion and sensitivity.

The title track Gifts is mostly a space-filling dialog between piano and saxophone with bowed bass lines and percussive sound interjections, which paints a picture of the mood rather than entangling the listener in a chatty web of notes. Echoes also falls into this category of restrained playing, in which supporting bass lines and percussion resemble temple blocks.

In contrast to this, Surely, for example, oscillates between familiar-sounding classical runs and bluesy shuffle rhythms, creating a chatty atmosphere that flatters the ear. And Darkness and Light, which use the instruments to tell of these very phenomena, is a visual experience.

It is pleasing how transparently and authentically August Wanngren has mixed the album. The instruments seem to stand as a compact block, but are excellently differentiated, fantastically tangible and dynamically finely tuned. And rarely have I heard a recording in which the acoustic instruments flow so realistically from the loudspeakers - and for comparison's sake - from the headphones. That is very high school.

All in all, the title of the album already provides the decisive indication of what Gifts has to offer: Gifts. (Thomas Semmler, HighResMac)

Fredrik Lundin, tenor- and mezzo soprano saxophone
Makiko Hirabayashi, piano
Thommy Andersson, bass
Bjørn Heebøll, drums, percussion