Steve Coleman Council of Balance: Synovial Joints review – ambitious but cordial maths-themed jazz

American saxophonist and composer Steve Coleman’s Functional Arrhythmias album had an untypical mellowness for this uncompromising artist, and this one takes that musical cordiality even further. Coleman’s decades-long mission has been to integrate mathematical regularities found in nature, astronomy and philosophy into improv music, and this expansion of his Five Elements band to a 21-piece – adding jazz, Latin and contemporary-classical musicians – is his most ambitious yet open-handed tilt at it. Lean, pithy themes still snap and swerve in Coleman’s signature manner, but the blend of elegant cello undertows and cool alto-sax melody on Acupuncture Openings, the warm trombone and string sounds on Celtic Cells, and the title suite’s tuba hooks and Afro-Cuban percussion are unexpectedly and consistently entrancing. Sometimes it sounds like an early New Orleans jazz band playing a film noir soundtrack with dashes of free-improv and salsa; in any case, Coleman’s rigour as a composer and improviser governs all of it.