This third album from the trio The 3Dom Factor, led by onetime Braxton and Sam Rivers drummer Barry Altschul, is also the final installment in a trilogy devoted to documenting the group’s development since their eponymous debut album, released in 2012. The accompanying material is full of the usual talk of improvised music being built around trust; how playing together and developing a vocabulary opens up freedom of musical choice. All of which is true, but that debut record, and its 2015 follow-up Tales Of The Unforeseen, were such confident statements that this new one is more about evolution than radical revolution. The opening ‘Martin’s Stew’, which also featured on that first album, appears in a more played-in, marinated version, and builds from an epic and timbrally supple drum solo towards Jon Irabagon’s solo, as delicate and pliable as a line drawing; Joe Fonda’s bass solo teases with the tension between countable walking bass and freeform bowing. Bop energies might have been fully distilled, but a tasty remake of Monk’s ‘Ask Me Now’ and Altschul’s hectic ‘For Papa Joe, Klook and Philly Too’ remind us of their aesthetic starting point. The final track, called ‘The 3Dom Factor’, moves with ease from a free slipstream of sound into a lurching groove, and back – and, the way these guys mess with time and math, they might well squeeze a fourth album into their trilogy.