This line-up of trumpet, alto saxophone, bass and drums clearly invokes the Ornette Coleman Quartet of the late 1950s/early 1960s: four trailblazing musicians unafraid to assert the truth ‘This Is Our Music’. The title of Nate Wooley's new quartet record, Knknighgh, might require more explanation, but the music itself shares Ornette's fearlessness and his knack for kicking away the scaffolding of familiarity without quite destroying the whole building. Like Wooley's recent 4CD box-set The Complete Syllables Music (reviewed in Jazzwise's September issue), the roots of this music lie in the written word and linguistics, in this case the American poet Aram Saroyan, famed for puréeing poetic structure down to an essence of a few words or hybrid syllables. And so Knknighgh is pronounced ‘knife’. Mirroring Saroyan's linguistic sleights-of-hand, Wooley generated these five pieces from compressed and compacted segments of material which are looped to the point of delirium. Wooley wants you to understand that this method is not meant to produce a fusion between free jazz and minimalism; and indeed, in the listening, you become aware of how the process in fact throws up gnarly disjoints and unexpected structural trapdoors. Chris Pitsikos' alto saxophone slices like a stiletto heel – and even in the first track, when his solo develops into a busy four-way conversation, his voice is never dimmed. But this is also music of great variety. Within that same track are stuttering chorales and industrious pockets of silence; and the focus shifts constantly throughout between line and block, repose and urgent action, between raw-boned timbre and an intensification of pitch.