Brian Wilson: At My Piano (Decca/digital outlets)

It sounds stupid and obvious to say it, but all songs start somewhere: a few words in a notebook; some chords explored, or – for the likes of Tori Amos, Randy Newman, Jimmy Webb and Brian Wilson – at the piano where all the musical possibilities are laid out in black and white.

As Webb told Elsewhere many years ago: “[I'm] looking at my piano, looking at the keyboard and thinking that it is the most graphic representation of what music is. It is an actual picture of all the notes, there are all the notes.

“Right there.

“All 88 of them and you can see were they are and how they relate to one another. And the keyboard tells you very clearly how they relate, where the octaves are.

“It is all just so well organised and graphically displayed that I believe piano players have a leg up when it comes to just imagining mathematically what the music looks like in their head.”

So to hear the great Brian Wilson – an elegant melodicist in addition to a gifted and idiosyncratic arranger – solo at his piano playing through some of his best known songs is like eavesdropping on genius at work.

Yes, this is him going back with the subsequent arrangements and harmonics in mind perhaps (notably on Good Vibrations), a far cry from the original tinkling and tentative exploration of melodic lines.

But here are the outlines and a little shading of great songs such as God Only Knows, the elegantly minimal In My Room, Don't Worry Baby (a song which rewards on every hearing, no matter who interprets it, a melody with a lovely internal logic), a somewhat dull and slow California Girls which really required those uplifting vocals, Wouldn't It Be Nice which emerges from those familiar opening notes, the ineffably sad I Just Wasn't Made For These Times and Surf's Up.

Here too is the reflective 'Til I Die from Surf's Up (which appears on the current Beach Boys' Feel Flows box set with different lyrics), the melancholy Warmth of the Sun which here sounds more like a cool dusk on an empty beach, Love and Mercy which seems so effortless you wonder why no one wrote it before and Good Vibrations with those layered lines and chords so in place it's impossible not hear the lyrics, doo-wop vocals and theremin in your head.

Albums like this, the expanded Let It Be box, Pete Townshend's Scoop series and those box sets in Dylan's Bootleg Series and the Beach Boys are hardly for the casual listener.

But for those of us who are curious about the creative process or just want to hear different iterations of the familiar something like At My Piano seems like a gift.

Somewhere a contemporary jazz pianist, probably on ECM, is listening to these tunes and thinking . . .

.

You can hear this album at Spotify here