Florian Weber, the 41-year-old German pianist/composer, has had some inspirational teachers since he swapped jazz for his childhood classical training – Joanne Brackeen, Paul Bley and John Taylor have been among his guides, and he shared a working group with Lee Konitz in the noughties. Weber’s partnerships with Konitz and more recently with trumpeter Markus Stockhausen reflect an affection for intimate improv conversations – a key feature of Lucent Waters, where his closely-attentive foil is the pure-toned New York trumpeter Ralph Alessi. But the contributions of bassist Linda May Han Oh and drummer Nasheet Waits are also crucial to both sides of this fine set’s agenda – spacious, loosely-floating passages and bursts of hard-driving attack, elements Weber balances with a storytelling shrewdness. Impressionistic episodes like ‘Brilliant Water’ – shading shy treble-piano trickles with delicate cymbal detail – and the freedom-to-swing ‘Butterfly Effect’ are fine examples of the former, while the leader’s cinematic sense fuels ‘Melody of a Waterfall’, with its glittering onrush of descending runs over a deep bass/drums turmoil. Weber nods to a comparable juggler of edginess and accessibility, the late Esbjörn Svensson, with ‘From Cousteau’s Point of View’ (a softly-rolling, Alessi-murmuring subaquatic reference to Svensson’s ‘From Gagarin’s Point of View’) and to Lee Konitz on the collective-improv ‘Honestlee’, and the fast ‘Time Horizon’ is a tour de force for an unstoppably hurtling Nasheet Waits.