The compositional catalogue of New York-resident Debra Kaye runs to around 70 works, ranging from orchestral and instrumental works to concertos, chamber operas, songs and choruses. This new album, the fourth issued by Navona (following a chamber album on its stablemate, Ravello, in 2014), features six pieces exhibiting a remarkably wide breadth of styles. The two piano pieces alone range from an almost New Age simplicity in the early At Liberty (1988), performed here by the composer herself, to the scrunchy discords of the volatile, nightmarish While We Were Sleeping (2012), rendered with relish by Craig Ketter. Both works have their origins in improvisations: At Liberty reportedly evolved over years while the composer was living in California.

Improvisation is integral to jazz, but Kaye’s remarkably idiomatic Colossus 1067, composed in 2021, is a through-composed tone picture inspired by a panoramic photograph of the ride, where the piano, bass and drums depict the mechanism of the roller coaster and the saxophone the rider; the rendition here by Dan Block, Steve Sandberg, Frank Wagner and David Meade is bracingly vivid. In complete contrast, three zen poems is a trio for shakuhachi, viola and cello (2019, rev 2022), inspired by verses from 15th- and 16th-century Zen Buddhist monks. A work of more philosophical character, James Schlefer’s playing of the Japanese instrument is mesmerising, and he is sensitively accompanied by David Yang and Hikaru Tamaki.

The title of the piano trio Time is the Sea We Swim In (2020, rev 2022) sounds like a quote but seems to be of Kaye’s invention (with no explicit connection to Frank Rose’s book The Sea We Swim In), a musical reaction in part to her mother’s death. A fairly closely argued single movement, circular in design and containing musical palindromes, its main arc is one of crescendo to diminuendo, well brought out by the Lincoln Trio. The Second Quartet (2017) is in three movements, moderate-slow-fast, written to mark the 25th anniversary of the Howland Music Circle, of which Kaye was a member. The Voxare Quartet play it for all its worth, particularly the vigorous final Danza energico.