Jazz industry convention would call FBN a piano trio but that would be something of a restrictive term. Cleaver, Parker and Taborn are intent on overriding any orthodoxy attached to their line-up and each often subverts the role of their instrument to such an extent that the resulting sounds are hard to define, which is one of the great triumphs of ‘la creation collective’, an expression that some audience members may well have used during these absorbing concerts recorded on tour in France last year. Each disc of this 2-CD set is taken from a different performance and the considerable shift in the character, energy and form of each set is itself testimony to the stylistic breadth of the players. While FBN invariably has something of the density and molten, disruptive percussion of small groups associated with the avant-garde, be they keyboard or horn-led – if there is a spirit floating freely over the music it is Roscoe Mitchell's – the ensemble comes into its own as a kind of ambient soundscaper of the most cryptic intent. Nowhere is this more apparent than on ‘Without A Name’, a bewitching composition of great understatement in which Cleaver's kick drum is like a faint heartbeat around which Parker's jarred arco and Taborn's caressed strings create a vividly spectral presence. Rather than turn up the tension before a grand release, the band allows the sombre mood to flicker with the slightest sparks of noise, before coming to a mournful extinction. As a meditation on absence, abandonment or perhaps loss of identity, in which precise control of sotto voce is at a premium, it is a deeply affecting piece. This is arguably the most anti-piano trio stance of the players, making the point that they are exercising their imaginations beyond standard expectations, and that takes them into uncertain, at times middling as well as exciting areas. But the wide idiomatic scope, genuine embrace of risk and steadfast rejection of cliché make Farmers By Nature an undeniably vital presence in any kind of contemporary creative music.