Playing South Hill Park Arts Centre, Bracknell on Friday, The Act of Noticing new from Espial is out on 24 May

It has been a good year for Martin Pyne fans almost up there with the annus mirabilis of 2020 that brought us - a gleam in the otherwise unrelenting gloom of Lockdowns that dread year - Spirits of Absent Dancers. First then in 2024 was from his Small Blue project in February and The Stealthy Moon - a piano trio recording that found the improvising drummer/percussionist/vibist/balafon player and composer with pianist David Beebee and double bassist Marianne Windham. There is a link between that fine release and the upcoming latest in that Beebee is here with Pyne again on what the latter describes as ''almost entirely improvised.''

A very different kind of sound to all of the above, as, completing the line-up, saxophonist Josephine Davies - last reviewed in these pages as part of The Harper Trio's very credible Passing By released just late last year - adds a mystical sense of her own. If you wish to summarise the album in two words consummate flow should suffice.

Rather than the dreamy Bill Evans-type atmosphere of Small Blue, The Act Of Noticing is an extension of Pyne and Beebee's ideas developed on Ripples which came out in 2022.

Pyne says that only ''… fresh snowfall at dawn'' uses pre-composed material as a basis for improvisation. You certainly couldn't know this if not told beforehand. ''Everything else is entirely spontaneous.'' That is uncanny. There is a firm naturalistic sense at play, whether grasped in the tidal clang of 'The Ever Changing Nature of River Water' or earlier the evocations of cicadas you'd swear were additional instruments amid the rustle of 'The Moment Summer Turns to Autumn.'