Sometimes descriptive language is inadequate. It's Always Now is a case in point as nothing here falls in any easily delineated genre. Perhaps if you take out the rear view mirror and cast it over 'Tumbleweed' the mood hovers not far from the cosmos of Tomasz Stańko or Enrico Rava because of the high levels of plangent abstraction trumpeter Ralph Alessi brings to us. 'Hanging By a Thread' has more of a chopping insistence, a jagged Paul Motian-like momentum served up by drummer Gerry Hemingway while Alessi - an American who now lives in Switzerland - is so expressive in that mournful way of his. Pianist Florian Weber's role as chief harmonist is carefully veiled and against the morse-like eerily almost non-human sounds that Alessi teases from his horn on the remarkable 'Hypnagogic' he allows us to enter a specific almost inert consciousness.

Pervasively dour ('Old Baby') most of the tunes are Alessi's. They form a powerfully individual thesis from a player who knows how to put his own band and compositional theories into his own time travelling, mysteriously serene and always humane, orbit. Out on 17 March. 'The Shadow Side' and 'Migratory Party' from the album are streaming ahead of release. Gerry Hemingway, Bänz Oester, Ralph Alessi, Florian Weber, photo: Luca Alfonso d'Agostino/ECM

MORE READING:

• Ralph Alessi live review, 2016

• Ralph Alessi interviewed, 2013