Luigi Palombi’s disc of Duke Ellington sets up a discussion of those ever-problematic issues raised whenever classical pianists co opt classic material by the jazz greats nicely. Just why would anyone want to hear a musician schooled in Brahms or Chopin play Ellington? Especially when Ellington’s own records are but a mouse-click away.

Palombi’s title – ‘Piano Works’ – ought to give any self-respecting jazz fan the heebie-jeebies, implying as it does that these Ellington pieces are preserved in aspic rather than being used as starting points for reinterpretation and improvisation. Black and Tan Fantasy, landmark early Ellington recorded by his orchestra in 1927, and the audaciously modernistic The Clothed Woman, cut in 1947, never were piano works – and presuming that a boiled-down transcription of an orchestral composition originally tailored to showcase Ellington’s illustrious instrumental soloists might be tackled with the same interpretative strategies that you bring to a Liszt transcription would be a mistake.

But Palombi won me over pretty much from the start. The only occasion Ellington himself officially recorded his first documented composition, Soda Fountain Rag, on his 1972 album ‘Live at the Whitney’, he tripped over his fingers – but Palombi’s nimble trot through its high-velocity stride piano figurations makes it shine. And generally this is a well-argued programme. Fleurette africaine, a high point of Ellington’s 1962 album ‘Money Jungle’ with Charles Mingus (bass) and Max Roach (drums), throws light on the Satie-like busy stillness of its apparently serene but actually volatile triadic patterns, while the surreal melt of harmonic non sequiturs that define The Clothed Woman are lent powerful objectivity without the jazz-orchestra filling.

All that said, there is, of course, no substitute for hearing Ellington play Ellington. The three extracts from the Sacred Concerts feel lost plucked from their original context, and while Palombi’s take on Ellington’s pirouetting Dancers in Love is charm itself, the litheness of Ellington’s own version on that same 1972 Whitney record is beyond transcription.