I'm listening to a very cheap impulse buy in the market yesterday, the Sonate en état de jazz (1982) by Alexis Weissenberg, played by Simon Mulligan on the piano.

Weissenberg has had a distinguished career in the recording studio as a solo pianist (I especially like this CD), and this piece sounds like one of the ways he passed the time in between playing Bach, Beethoven, Rachmaninoff and the rest of them. He writes in his autobiographical note about "the monotonous life between suitcases and concert halls". One can see and hear him, late in the afternoon when he should have been practising his Beethoven for the concert to come, instead freewheeling away on his rehearsal piano. And then one day, he thought, why don't I write this down …?

Being a classical man, he felt no need (or I'd have fled in disgust) to add drums and plink-plink-plinking from a bowless double bassist in sunglasses. But being a man of his time, his mind turned to jazzy modulations rather than only to the solemnities of whatever composition classes he may have had in his youth, even as those solemnities have left their mark.

Well, that's what it sounded like to me. I bought it simply to find out what sort of music this man composed. I've long ago given up expecting to enjoy CDs of this sort. But I liked it.