Formanek may be known primarily through his long running association with Tim Berne but he has been a bandleader of note since the early 1990s, and after a recent run of albums on ECM this ambitious orchestral offering points very much to an artist at his creative peak. Packed with bandleaders in their own right, Kolossus gels powerfully as an ensemble in which composed and improvised parts fit into a strong conceptual core. The balance struck between understatement and emphasis – and the overall narrative richness – is such that the music works as much as a caress in the twilight as it does a punch under a harsh neon glare. Indeed the thoroughly ferocious fanfare of ‘Exoskeleton’ (Part 1 ‘Impenetrable’), with its rasping, stabbing eighth note pattern is one of the great ‘energy’ moments of the whole score, where high and low end are deployed with real verve, as if the Gil Evans- Hendrix legacy was dragged into greater abstraction. Yet the tenderness heard elsewhere, above all in the floating, hazy, near hallucinatory quality of some of Tomas Fujiwara’s fine drumming takes the listening experience in an entirely different direction, and as the set unfolds, Formanek proceeds to increasingly reveal his hand as a composer equally versed in Ellington’s gilded lyricism and the stark density of Bill Dixon á la Intents And Purposes. Swooning, airy flutes and clarinets, and lithe, skipping marimba create an enormous amount of nuance in the band’s palette while all the solo statements are anything but perfunctory. A work of impressive gravity rather than bombast, The Distance is an epic that more than justifies its grand scale and lofty ambition.