When Boston locked down for the pandemic, Yoko Miwa responded by sitting at her piano and writing music. Five of those recent pieces made it onto her new album whose title exemplifies her attitude in the face of catastrophe. The title number is actually by Billy Preston and treated as a spare ballad with hopeful notes and funky implications. Her own songs are lively in contemporary straight-ahead jazz style, ably backed by her longtime collaborators, bassist Will Slater and drummer Scott Goulding. Her virtuosic piano playing can digress into florid European romanticism but the musical through-line is grounded in such jazz predecessors as Art Tatum and Nat “King” Cole.
