British saxist and composer Trish Clowes’ ambitious third album mixes five new small-group pieces and three large-scale collaborations with the BBC Concert Orchestra. She keeps improv at the top of her agenda here, but weaves in jazz and contemporary-classical methods too; both the playing and the material suggest her confidence and authority are on a roll. She bursts into the set with free-jazz tenor-sax eruptions, James Maddren’s mallet-rolls and the orchestra’s opulently insistent chords on the opener, and revels in her increasingly quickwitted Wayne Shorter-inspired sound over Chris Montague’s stabbed guitar chords on Question Mark. She’s more lyrically soulful on Symphony in Yellow, wriggly and light on Balloon, abstract and multiphonic on Porcupine, almost rapturously Bobby Wellins-like on tenor on the airborne orchestral piece, Chorale. All the pieces are different, and Clowes’ intuitive one-twos with pianist Gwilym Simcock so closely echo Shorter and the Herbie Hancock of old that it’s almost uncanny.
