Given the gulf that exists between the populist and the esoteric in music today, any artist with a sufficiently strong identity to render these divides irrelevant can but stand out. Threadgill, a composer-improviser of defiant originality, makes music that has a toughness and weightiness that invoke the spirit of the most hard-boiled of bluesmen and a finesse and delicacy that would delight any adept of chamber music: the musings of his mind are as emphatic as they are understated, as challenging as they are playful. Threadgill's arrangements appear to be conceived not so much in a fixed key signature as a kind of polytonality of enormous flexibility, so that each player seems to have his own elastic harmonic pivot that nonetheless spins into organic cohesion with that of his colleagues.

The result is music that often comprises short, terse phrases that blur the distinction between the rhythmic and melodic to function as ever shifting, oddly slanted counterpoint. If the structural invention of the music is one thing, then its timbral richness is another.

Threadgill's love of low pitches has been clear through his longstanding use of the tuba in previous groups such as Make A Move and Very Very Circus, but the way that the instrument combines with his own bass flute here is enchanting. It produces a sultry, crepuscular haze rather than heaviness, so that the ballooning wind sounds in the group float around the often-spikier notes of the guitars and drums. In contrast to the dream-state quality of some tracks there is a hop-skip-jump funkiness elsewhere when Elliot Humberto Kavee's beat jockeys back and forth between the horns. This ability to switch from meditative melancholia to explosive danger is a surefire indication of the wide expressive range of the band, whose much-anticipated gig at last year's London Jazz Festival did not disappoint. Its leader has the utmost strength of character. He is simply a colossus in contemporary creative music.