Most jazz musicians worry about where their next album is coming from, but Ivo Perelman isn’t most jazz musicians and, like Anthony Braxton, thinks in terms of album cycles and projects that reveal themselves over multi-volumes. Appreciating Perelman, therefore, requires an unusual investment of both time and cash, but only rarely does he disappoint (even if some readers might not yet have made it through the 7CD anthology he released this summer on Leo, featuring Matthew Shipp, under the title The Art of Perelman-Shipp). Perelman’s USP is his extraordinary knack for yanking open the high register of his tenor saxophone, making its inherent instability stable somehow, and reminding you of Coltrane’s latter-period experiments with an alto saxophone. But despite this concentration on an aspect of the tenor saxophone that exists only as a theoretical possibility, Perelman’s music views Trane-like visions of the heavens as though from the earth up. In the absence of David S Ware, Matthew Shipp obviously feels Perelman to be a kindred spirit, though their creative relationship is etched around a shifting cast of associates, rather than the permanence of an on-going group. A rotating procession of drummers – Bobby Kapp (who worked with Gato Barbieri and Marion Brown), Gerald Cleaver, Jeff Cosgrove, Joe Hertenstein – imbue the albums with distinct feels for time, from Cleaver’s sometimes hardly-there infections to Hertenstein’s hectic hyperactivity. Trumpeter Nate Wooley’s sheets (mattresses more like) of sound pressgang Perelman into predictably maximalist terrain; but the surprise on the 2CD duo with Shipp, Live In Brussels, are their sustained drone-like mantras warmed with a melodic core. Heptagon, with Shipp, Kapp and William Parker, with its mesmerising grooves and gamey melodic manoeuvres, is the standout disc (and where you go if buying the full set feels like a step too far).