Erik Bosgraaf - Hotel Terminus

The Terminus Hotel takes Bach's Brandenburg Concertos to a penthouse bar and lets them loosen their ties, pressed here on high-quality bio-vinyl.

Erik Bosgraaf has built his career by taking the recorder, an instrument most people last encountered in an elementary school classroom, to places where it doesn't belong. Here he leads a modern jazz ensemble through seven pieces, each named after a hotel, and genre labels cease to be useful almost immediately: baroque rhetoric, lounge, jazz and minimalism coexist in the same lobby. Ask which parts are improvised and which are composed, and the question dissolves in your hands.

The concept is the indefinite space of the international chain hotel, that special state of feeling entirely at home and completely suspended from the city outside the window, whether Tokyo, London or Los Angeles. Time behaves strangely in these corridors, as does music. Sheraton captures the sublime slow melody of the First Brandenburger and jams it on a loop while other instruments come in and out. Adler opens the album with riffs that build to an ostinato, and Terminus closes it somewhere between arrival and departure.

Call it elevator music with a grain of salt in the oyster. Perfect for one last brandy and soda, forty-five floors up, watching a city go on without you.