A longstanding sideman to Steve Coleman, guitarist-composer Miles Okazaki has been steadily building an impressive discography as an artist in his own right, and this excellent album should enhance his standing.

Moving away from the song-based character of his previous work, Thisness presents music that has the structural fluidity and shape-shifting quality of the best creative works but nonetheless keeps a hard snap of funk in the midst of it, thus bridging the gap between tight and loose groove with great skill.

The material fans out and goes somewhere while retaining a highly communicative undercurrent. “I’ll Build A World’ is the centerpiece of the set in this respect, starting with the kind of strutting backbeat once known as ‘phat’ in the hip-hop lexicon before unwinding into a wonderfully malleable passage of interplay between all the members of the band – Okazaki’s Coleman colleagues Anthony Tidd and Sean Rickman are imperious- that massages tempo, meter and tonality through mini episodes that then conclude with robot-like percussive glitches.

Throughout the album, the relationship between composition and improvisation, and more to the point, leader and accompanists, is similarly provocative, making it clear that Miles Okazaki is an artist with a strong identity within the strong identity of other like-minded souls.