Have Germany's Winter & Winter label stopped doing their special cardboard CD design packaging? Well, as they say, it's the music that counts and this is one of the label's favourite sons, the brilliant, underrated drummer Jim Black, who as well as making his mark in the past playing with Tim Berne, Uri Caine and Dave Douglas, has recorded some exceptional grunge-jazz CDs for the label since 2000 with his cult band AlasNoAxis, and has been an inspiration for a post-millennium generation of young musicians including Seb Rochford. Those who've witnessed Black live will know he can hit the most earsplitting, fattest groove you're ever likely to hear in the jazz world. But his second piano trio recording, Actuality, draws from ambient as much as the more hard-hitting rhythms and beats of rock, hip hop and electronic. The trio occasionally sound like a less erratic version of The Bad Plus. The Austrian pianist Elias Stemeseder adds a calmer Euro-jazz dimension to the sound although with a Paul Bley-ish approach at times, and Thomas Morgan is one of the most outstanding acoustic bassists of the younger jazz generation in New York. (The trio formed in 2008 at the JIMS, the summer academy for Jazz and Improvised Music in Salzburg). Black, somewhat characteristically, mixes an intensity and simplicity derived from alt. rock and urban groove aesthetics with a subtle invention drawn from his roots in jazz. In this field, Jim Black is in a class of his own.