The closest forerunner to the newest incarnation of the iconoclastic The Bad Plus –founder members Reid Anderson and Dave King switched a few years ago from being an acoustic piano trio to an electric sax-guitar quartet – might be drummer Jim Black’s Alasnoaxis.

That band was a pivotal inspiration in the noughties for jazz musicians’ defiant embrace of the post-Nirvana alt-rock landscape at a time when The Bad Plus were helping to set down the markers for a bold new wave of piano trio jazz.

The instrumental line-up of both is entirely the same and another common factor is the presence of the singular reedsman Chris Speed.

The new Plus though, explores an area of current alt-rock jazz, at times grungy and full-on at others more ambient and spaced-out, but all the while responding to the music in a way that only those entirely immersed in the contemporary jazz/improv world could.

While their eponymous debut release from 2022 (see review in Jazzwise 279) sounded like they were just starting to find their feet, Complex Emotions represents a clear and positive progression; the quartet achieves a more refined, compact and unified studio-sculpted sound this time round, with all four band members knitting together superbly.

Anderson’s compositions, that make up the majority of the originals here are at a high level so no change there; King’s tunes, always that little bit quirkier and mischievously abstract are perfectly complementary.

The Bad Plus, on this most recent recorded evidence, can still claim to be one of the hippest, baddest instrumental bands operating on the planet today.