This trio collaboration – of long-time partners Ingrid Laubrock and Tom Rainey on saxes and drums, joined by young Puerto Rican New Yorker Brandon Lopez on bass – emerged from an impromptu performance in Brooklyn's almost deserted Barbès bar in 2017. Laubrock and Rainey hit it off so intuitively with Lopez that their trio coalesced by osmosis rather than negotiation, on top of which this studio recording taps a fortuitously prolific seam of music-making for them in the lockdown months of shared online experimentation. All the pieces on No Es La Playa are unflinchingly non-generic free-jazzy originals, but they draw on a wide span of traditional and contemporary sonic and structural resources all three have routes into. Lustrous-toned tenor-sax reflectiveness turns to barrelling uptempo freebop over Lopez' fast bass walk and Rainey's scampering free-swing on the title piece, while the final track's 'The Black Bag Of Want' moves from an intro of slewing bowed-bass sounds snapped at by Rainey's snare hits and cantering tattoos, to a development in raw tenor multiphonics over a headlong rhythmic sprint in which Lopez and Rainey seem indivisibly joined.

In between come the squally tenor-blow 'When the Island is a Shipwreck' (ending up unexpectedly close to the Cool School's cryptic lyricism); the ethereal, tonally-nuanced soprano feature 'Saturnian Staring'; 'Camposanto Chachacha', with its freewheeling solo-tenor centrepiece and staccato closing section driven by Lopez' furiously precise bowing, and the spacious, abstract 'Little Distance Before'. No Es La Playa - 'it's not the beach' - accurately defines this album's resistance to any form of indolence, but if it's often edgy free-jazzmaking, it's in a very articulate league.