Pianist Pablo Held is perhaps one of the best known young jazz musicians on the Cologne jazz scene, and over the last few years has been making his presence felt with his highly accomplished trio around Germany. His reviews in the Arts pages of countless German broadsheets (and yes, arts in Germany still mean the arts, not like the UK, where arts pages have somehow mutated into a forum to advertise the latest rock, pop and cinematic wares) speak of a significant talent and one who has a promising future ahead of him. Glow II, although with an ensemble built around the nucleus of his regular trio (since 2005 integral to his musical vision), is an experimental endeavour in managing freedom. But I’ve always thought subjecting free jazz to critical scrutiny often makes free jazz and criticism look ridiculous since most people agree that while there’s something there, traditional criticism can’t quite say what because so much defies conventional musical logic, which in many cases is the whole point of the freedom principal. Attempts to isolate meaning, paradox, incongruity or the intellectual underpinning that gives music its purpose ends up in a welter of imprecise preference synonyms or an attempt to reduce free jazz to an objective structure when no such structure was intended. All that matters in free jazz is being there to experience it – immediate sensation is all. A recording is somehow an incomplete explanation of ‘the event’ since the one-to-one experience of the lone listener at home removes the music from its performance context where the visual element contributes to the overall impact of the performance. Without it, listening at home, our brains often struggle to make the connections (it’s the way our brains work to make sense of the world around us) from which we construe meaning, unlike other areas of jazz where we have form, structure, rhythm, harmony, melody and harmony – the formal and intellectual elements of music – to cling to and shape our response. And while Glow II has an overall scheme within each composition where thematic elements are introduced and developed, ultimately it is less about the avoidance, more about the indulgence of a kind of refined musical freedom that we feel we should like, but don’t.