Jazz saxophone styles have mutated in unimagined ways since Charlie Parker's day, but the best negotiators of bebop's harmonic mazes still get widely noticed in every generation. Since he unveiled his mastery of the art in the early 2000s with his debut album, Cherokee, the Brittany-raised alto saxophonist Pierrick Pédron has made his mark around the world – but most notably in Paris and New York, the jazz cities he celebrates in two releases for his 50th year, the first acoustic, the second electric. Fifty-Fifty New York Sessions, made with the classy US threesome of pianist Sullivan Fortner, Brad Mehdau bassist Larry Grenadier, and drums virtuoso Marcus Gilmore, launches the project with nine Pedron originals. Fast bop is perhaps unsurprisingly first out of the traps, with the whooping, zigzagging ‘Bullet T’ bursting over Grenadier's flat-out bass walk and Gilmore's skimming cymbals, but Pedron nonetheless inventively mixes slurring long sounds and expressive elisions with the regulation glittering streams of semiquavers. He fuses ingeniously straying thematic lines with familiar song-shapes on the breezy ‘Be Ready’ and ‘Boom’, and the distantly Tristano-like ‘Unknown 2’ (Fortner's balance of elastic contrapuntal ambiguities and Monkish silences constantly creates apposite foils for the leader), and is post-Coltraneishly loose and soulful on the reflective ‘Trevise’ and the smoulderingly slow ballad ‘Mizue’. Reaching 50 seems to have enthused the engaging Pierrick Pedron with renewed affection for all he's learned, and confidence in how he can continue to stretch it in the coming years.