In 2019, guitar-star judges, including Pat Metheny, John Scofield and Lionel Loueke, embraced the precocious arrival of Max Light, one of the instrument’s latest and most gifted rising stars, at that year’s Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz’s International Guitar Competition - and though on that occasion Light was runner-up to the young Russian prodigy Evgeny Pobozhiy, the exposure set the now Brooklyn-based virtuoso on his way.

Chaotic Neutral is Light’s third recording as a leader, and it affirms how close to a finished article - albeit a fresh and forward-looking one - he increasingly sounds.

The opening ‘Pathos’ establishes Light’s signature characteristics - spiky, short-burst melodies delivered with glistening precision, skid-turn rhythm-changes, a warmly-rounded tone, and gracefully skimming double-time improv shapes once he eases out into passages of swing. The fluent Caleb Curtis’ stritch (it’s a straight-horn alto sax Rahsaan Roland Kirk used to favour) unfolds the lilting theme of ‘Vals Quartzite’, framing Light’s delicate fills, while the title track is a knotty, stop-start theme over a piano/bass ostinato that develops in edgy guitar breaks and a bass solo from Walter Stinson that mirrors his leader’s meticulous agility.

‘Is It True’ is a dreamily lyrical feature for Light and that fine pianist Julian Shore, ‘Brown Bear’ a rhythm-stuttering piece steadied into lyricism by Caleb Curtis, and the racing finale ‘Things’ gives both Light and Shore a dazzling free run across classic bop-changes territory.

Perhaps Light might loosen the strictures of a few knottily-recurring rhythm patterns to let the improv stray more freely, but the splicing of avant-swing and more jagged contemporary guitar thinking that have made Allan Holdsworth and Kurt Rosenwinkel significant models for him indicate that Max Light might already be emerging as a model for the generation around the corner.