A piano, a studio, four walls and a series of windows opening onto infinity. 88 black and white keys in front of you and an infinite variety of ways to play them, an infinite range of harmonies and melodies at your fingertips. Total artistic solitude and intense concentration as you warm up for that vertiginous balancing act on the tightrope of improvisation. Recording an album as a solo pianist is an overwhelming challenge, one which involves pushing back the limits of the self and taming an almost unbounded freedom. The panic of facing the blank page with, if not your entire life in front of you, then the pressure of wrapping the whole thing up in two days (given the fact that you've already blown almost your entire budget on a first session that went nowhere).

Two days to distil the essence of your art and recount your life through your instrument, two days to take one of the biggest artistic risks of your career. Not surprising then, that Jacky Terrasson has taken years to get to this point. But the pianist's desire to make a solo album has been gestating away inside of him for years and it has finally proved stronger than his fear of finding himself alone in the studio void. "Working alone in the studio has to be the most difficult thing in the world," he declares, "Somehow you have to manage to create everything there in situ – the ambience, the emotion, the colour, the dynamic… Recording solo in a studio is very different from performing solo live. When I'm up on stage I've got the audience to stimulate me. And I can't suddenly stop playing because I'm not satisfied with what I'm doing. I have to push on regardless. There's a flux, a process of exchange in a live performance. In the studio, I've been known to stop and start the same piece forty times because I'm not happy with the first note!"

Terrasson confesses he much prefers recording as part of a trio. There at least the musicians support one another, accentuating one another's artistic expression and limiting any urge towards excess or exuberance. Recording solo there is no support system, no constraints, no safety rail, just the dizzying prospect of unlimited possibility and all its attendant dangers. And then there's that absurd feeling that you're sitting there playing for no-one. "At the end of the day," laughs Terrasson somewhat ruefully, "It's just me sitting there gazing at my navel. It's a very narcissistic process!" And it seems an anxious one, too, the artist locked up alone with all his doubts and insecurities, the "Mirror, mirror on the wall… " moments, the constant need for reassurance.

Terrasson actually went into the studio with a list of twenty pieces, most of them his own original compositions. The run-up to his two-day studio session had been spent working and re-working his technique. And he admits, "I'm sure I rehearsed too much, placing unrealistic demands on myself." < i="" />

The fourteen radiant tracks on Mirror display an impressive range of influences, moving from classical romantic music through the Impressionist works of the early 20^th century. Meanwhile, the ghost of Thelonius Monk hovers omnipresent throughout. A hint of autobiographical revelation can be glimpsed at certain times in Terrasson's original compositions, in the freshness and tenderness of Juvenile, the musing about origins in Tragic Mulatto Blues and the fragmented self-portrait of the title track. But Terrasson also excels at cover versions, time-honoured jazz classics such as Caravan and Just a Gigolo springing to new life at his fingertips.

"Classics anchor you," he says, "but at the same time they can be used as vehicles to truly express yourself. What I really enjoy doing is improvising around the basic structure, then taking the whole thing apart before putting it back together again differently. When I play I'm always looking for the odd little nook and cranny. I'm always trying to come up with different angles for phrasing." Terrasson is now eager to take his new repertoire to the stage and see how things evolve there. But this particular Narcissus at his piano is, of course, too modest to imagine that his improvisations have anything but room for improvement!