American tenor saxophonist Noah Preminger won the Rising Star category for his instrument in the 2017 Downbeat Critics Poll, and has since released a flurry of recordings, including covers of the movie themes of distant-relative Otto Preminger, a standards duo set, and this session for a terrific quartet featuring trumpeter Jason Palmer. Preminger is a conceptually imaginative, technically scorching performer who can make Coltrane/Brecker-like uptempo constructions (the standby spiral up from barrelling low-note churnings to falsetto split-tones, for instance) sound completely fresh, alongside an early-jazz lyrical warmth and languid timing when teasing meanings from slow music. In the liner notes, he makes no secret of daily anxieties about mortality, and witty, surefooted writings on this set's title theme by his New England Conservatory poet-in-residence, friend Ruth Lepson, are included in the insert. But the music is the main event. A dark trumpet/sax dirge over Rudy Royston's free-floating drums (‘World of Twelve Faces’) stretches to surprise-packed improvisations over a rolling groove, from the horns and from sleek guitarist Max Light. ‘World of Growth’ is like an old-school bebop twister with a country tinge, developed as fast free-swing polyphony in a horn dialogue recalling Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry ‘Nothing World’, an interpretation of Handel's ‘Ombra Mai Fu’ from the opera Serse, starts in a breathy tenor murmur and becomes a yearning sax/trumpet interplay All eight tracks are resoundingly delivered, and the compositions are almost as consistently good.