The Rub and Spare Change ECM ****

For this typically singular album, bassist, composer and perennial avant-gardist Michael Formanek assembled kindred spirits Tim Berne (alto), Craig Taborn (piano) and Gerald Cleaver (drums). It's a triumph for the leader, whose bare-bones pieces combine the prescriptive and the indeterminate in ways that allow these gifted, like-minded players to develop each performance organically, however far outside the parameters they venture. And though the brilliantly maverick Berne and Taborn make much of the running, notably on the motif-based title track and Too Big to Fail,these are cannily shaped group performances handled with lucid freedom. At times such pieces as the boppish Inside the Box unexpectedly evoke a contemporary, freer take on Monkor Tristano, but the focused unity of the band, especially on the 17-plus minutes of the three-part

Tonal Suite, is like no other. See classical.ie