Mitchell's 2017 release, A Pouting Grimace, flexed its compositional muscle by way of a large ensemble conducted by Tyshawn Sorey; Phalanx Ambassadors trims the instrumental forces down to five musicians all of whom, Okazaki excepted, played on that earlier album, but in terms of varied instrument timbre and Mitchell's knack of providing improvising musicians with a questioning compositional context that opens up the terrain; absolutely nothing has been lost. The opening piece, ‘Stretch Goal’, with its spaghetti-junction basslines and roadrunner chord sequence, is an audacious starting-point that prepares the palette – via two relatively clean-cut interludes, ‘Taut Pry’ and ‘Zoom Romp’ – digging your titles, Matt – for the album's main feature, the labyrinthine 16-minute ‘Phasic Haze Ramps’. As so often with Mitchell, a poised compositional object, once improvisers get their hands on it, forks off in a multitude of simultaneous directions; the metric, gestural complexity of Gentile's drum patterns weaving in, and around, tailing-chasing melodic counterpoint.