This is the kind of super-smart, semi-abstracted, hyper-deconstructed music making that benefits greatly from a little interpretive contextualisation to help the general listener (e.g. me) make sense of it. Happily, ACT has commissioned a liner note to shape my (and perhaps your) response to the extravagant inventions of the Émile Parisien Quartet. ‘The material they propose,’ writes filmmaker Damien Bertrand, ‘is above all the subtraction of what it refuses to be’. Oh. Not much assistance after all, then. Parisien is a much-fancied (and much-awarded) up-and-comer on the French jazz scene, and his quartet are noted for their ability to run the gamut from ‘Ornithology’ and Ornette to Wagner's ‘Tristan und Isolde’ in the space of just a few bars. The sound they make on second track ‘Haricot Guide’ is so rich in rapid-fire allusive wit that it can seem as though they're taking the mick: they speed up, come to a dead halt, start to swing, the pianist plays a line that sounds as if it's been edited in from another song, etc – brilliant but hard to dance to. Or, to put it another way: it's above all the subtraction of what it refuses to be, and personally I really like its spirit, not to mention being bowled over by its chops.