Trombonist/composer Nils Wogram and Root 70 released Riomar, their third album of "Conceptual Works," in January 2014, and Wogram and his longstanding creative jazz quartet again proved their ability to remain broadly appealing while exploring new musical directions. Issued in 2008, On 52nd 1/4 Street (subtitled Conceptual Works I) found the band playing vintage bop-style "interpretations" of "standards" that were actually new originals, while on 2010's Listen to Your Woman (Conceptual Works II), Root 70 took a deep dive into the blues. Riomar melds modern jazz and chamber music, with Root 70's harmonically adventurous foursome of Wogram, microtonal alto saxophonist Hayden Chisholm, bassist Matt Penman, and drummer Jochen Rueckert supplemented by three outstanding, empathetic string players: violinist Gerdur Gunnarsdottir, violist Gareth Lubbe, and cellist Adrian Brendel. Lovely unaccompanied strings introduce the opening track, "Lisboa," with arco lines giving way to pizzicato accompaniment as the Root 70 quartet enters and Chisholm plays a pretty melody over a deliberate rhythmic pace; the plucked strings enliven rather than soften Wogram's modern jazz arrangement. These string players are clearly comfortable playing music whose genre distinctions have been blurred. At the start of the album's title track, Lubbe's wide-vibrato, double stop-inflected viola exudes a mournful country bluesiness, but when Chisholm enters, followed by the rest of the ensemble, the distance between rural roots and urban jazz sophistication is seamlessly and instantaneously erased. As "Riomar" stretches languidly past the ten-minute mark with several beautifully played solo features, its chamberesque approach to the blues is certainly atmospheric, although fans of the genre's unvarnished side (clearly not what the ensemble was aiming for here) might find the track to be a bit overly polite.

1		Lisboa
2		Vacation Without Internet
3		Riomar
4		Don't Believe
5		Mental Isolation
6		Playing the Game
7		Seeing the New in the Old
8		Uniformly Uniformed
9		Song for Bernhard
10		Traveling Home