Another month, another fast-rising US West Coast name emerges and starts making waves, here in the form of Los Angeles alto saxophonist Nicole McCabe on this, her impassioned fourth album. With the long shadows of mid-2010s titans Kamasi Washington and Thundercat, and latterly drummer Louis Cole, doing much to knock down genre-boundaries and gatecrash the mainstream, McCabe is very much part of a new breed of players happy to wear their jazz stripes but create malleable, elastic versions the likes of post-bop or even fusion, with melodies to the fore and a bristling pulse.

Mosaic is sonically acoustic, but much like fellow fire-breathing altoist Immanuel Wilkins, McCabe attacks each phrase with a gutsy power, her chewy tone cutting decisively through pianist Rodriguez’s wide voicings. It’s also good to hear bassist Logan Kane, her life and musical partner, holding his own on upright with the scatter-gun beats of Tim Angulo generating some real rhythm-section heat.

Former Tortoise guitarist Jeff Parker only appears on one track, the moody ‘Tight Grip’, where he aptly shadows McCabe’s sax before soloing cooly. But it’s Parker’s hand on the production tiller throughout, and there’s a real sense of artistic maturity about the session – the inclusion of trumpet and trombone on two tracks demonstrating the altoist’s arranging ambitions are also on the up. Nifty unison bass-and-left-hand piano lines frequently add interest too, such as when the resourceful Rodriguez happily switches from an unfurling solo to spiky octave jumps to boost the leader’s jabbering lines on the shifting sensibilities of ‘Walking Statue’, that remains anything but static.

McCabe is effusive throughout, the pensive closer, the samba-ish ‘Derschke’, featuring one of her most angular improvisations that builds to a vein-busting climax that the great Kenny Garrett would be proud of.

There’s a new alto-slinging sax player on the block, and with this album Nicole McCabe sounds like she’s truly arrived.