Some acoustic jazz piano trios in the Bill Evans tradition sound almost as good on disc as they do live. Engineers often catch not only the explicit detail of the music they play, but also the vaporous detail of the way they play it.

This works less consistently for Lynne Arialle, the 44-year-old pianist from Milwaukee. A subtle and intelligent player with a remarkably soft touch, who cherishes the faintest whisper of a vibration from the frame of her instrument, she sometimes sounds tamed by the studio. Her classical origins can take over to make her sound more fastidious and reserved than she really is. But her live shows are captivating, not least for her relationship with her regular percussionist Steve Davis. This more formal term suits Davis better than "drummer", since he uses familiar jazzy drum and cymbal patterns sparingly. Instead, he prefers to organise the sonics and tones of his kit to provide a more displaced kind of pulse.

Arialle began with a typically lacy, breeze-rustled overture of arpeggios and ruminative murmurs that developed over Davis's calculatingly uneven rhythmic figures into Chick Corea's Tones For Joan's Bones. Then came the Arialle speciality, the standard song that emerges as if she had barely breathed on the keys. She initially imparted this treatment to Feeling Good before it accelerated into a McCoy Tynerish chant over Jay Anderson's steady bass vamp, and sustained it through a long meditation on The Nearness of You.

Lennon and McCartney's Blackbird was much jauntier, over a Latin pulse of bouncy brushwork. It featured an inventive break from Anderson; his persuasiveness is not diminished by modest amplification and a soft tone. As on the new CD Arialle is currently promoting, Thelonious Monk's Bemsha Swing seems distracted rather than enhanced by the band's rather formal, isolated foray into free-improv, but Abdullah Ibrahim's sonorous Mountain of the Night and a rollicking calypso were right on the money.