Brian Landrus’ quartet (plus strings) plays straight-ahead jazz in the best sense. On For Now, his tenth album as a leader, the composer-musician moderates a combo where individual skills merge in sync. Melodic with shifting tempos, Landrus’ own numbers take imaginative flight and land on a dime. The music is lush and yearning on “For Whom I Imagined,” where Landrus delves deep into the tonalities of bass clarinet and grows sexy-swoony on the baritone-sax driven “Clarity in Time.” For “Round Midnight,” he veers into a Cubist rearrangement of that jazz standard.
