Recorded live at the Jacqueline du Pré Music Room last year at the end of a national tour by the Convergence Quartet, this album is a perfect example of the richly varied nature of free improvisation. Featuring two players of international standing, American trumpeter Taylor Ho Bynum and Canadian drummer Harris Eisenstadt, plus the fast-rising talents of two young local players, Alexander Hawkins on piano and Dominic Lash on bass, this concert contains the variety of skills and approaches that makes jazz taken into the unchartered country of musical freedom so exciting and unpredictable.

Taylor Ho Bynum (pictured), who here plays cornet and flugelhorn, is a musician and composer who works tirelessly as performer and educator. He is very articulate about his music. "People have to realise that they are so busy fetishising the jazz of the past and the historical periods of the past to realise that we are at an incredibly, radical, transitional period . . . I think it is imperative that artists deal with that." The fossilisation of our responses to music including jazz constantly stultifies our response to new ideas, so this album which has the immediacy of a live event is a welcome addition to the growing discography from musicians who wish to respond artistically to the more radical nature of the cultural landscape.

With the shifting tonal quality of Ho Bynum's spare lines arching over the rush and tremble of Eisenstadt's drumming, while Lash boosts and counters on bass and Hawkins introduces floods of highly articulated notes, the music on this album (FMR CD223-0307) is constantly curving and developing in a way that earlier free jazz often failed to do. From moments of almost silence, with Lash teasing the edges of his bass or Bynum lifting single notes into the wonderful acoustic of the JDP, through to full-on duos between Hawkins and Eisenstadt, this is an album full of lightning responses from all the players and moments of magical innovation. Though inevitably best experienced in the moment, this recording perfectly captures the freshness of the event.