NOT since the 1960 civil rights days of the release of Max Roach’s epochal album We Insist! with its sleeve photograph of the desegregation of a Jim Crow restaurant, have I seen such a thematic sleeve image as that of the album Smoke Gets in Your Eyes by the pianist/composer Cory Smythe, accompanied by the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra.

Russell Kaye’s revelatory photograph shows two canoeists struggling with river rapids, rowing past a huge forest fire on a riverbank in Manitoba province, Canada, while other pictures show singers and crooners, from Sarah Vaughan to Bryan Ferry, who have sung the song and its composers Jerome Kern and Otto Harbach. It creates an astonishing amalgam of the aural and visual.

Smythe was born in 1977, near Chicago. “My Dad would play the piano when he got home from working at the printing press, and I started emulating what he played when I was quite little,” he tells me.