JD Allen, the Michigan-born tenor saxophonist, has a poetic imagination and a resolute focus on how best to use it. Unconcerned by what the hippest new jazz sound might be about to become, he has stayed close to the music’s deepest roots - blues, and the conversational exchanges between improvisers that have always driven jazz’s vigour and immediacy. Yet he consistently finds his own ways of inflecting the music with modernity too.

On The Dark, The Light, The Grey and The Colorful Allen’s creative confidence in fronting pianoless bands steadily grows on this set with regular drummer Nic Cacioppo, and Gregg August and Ian Kenselaar sharing acoustic and electric bass duties. The title is a reflection on both the natural world’s colours and on humanity’s colours. The haunting murmur of Allen’s lovely tone opens the spacious ‘Time’ and elegantly boppish flurries between calm long sounds and bass/drums rejoinders sketch out ‘Know Thorn’.

Supple tenor-balladism enfolded by arco bass on ‘Know Rose’, the irrepressibly bass-walking swinger ‘Code (Switch’) and the lurching, growling, stop-go narrative of ‘If They Holler Let Them Go’ are highlights of a captivating set. JD Allen has made a personal signature out of the use of bop-to-Trane melodic shapes within a calmly space-revering free-ensemble format, and he and his closely-attuned partners have become unassuming masters of the art.