For over three decades, the American trumpeter Ralph Alessi has been a sought-after multi-stylistic virtuoso sideman, and in more recent years a composer/bandleader of subtle authority.

After three fine ECM albums with all-American lineups, It's Always Now marks his move from New York to Switzerland in 2020, forming a new quartet with his compatriot Gerry Hemingway on drums, plus the German/Swiss piano/bass pairing of Florian Weber and Bänz Oester. There are 10 Alessi originals, plus three tracks co-composed with Weber, and if anything the ease with which the leader traverses warm, avant-ballad lyricism, fast freebop, plaintive ambient tones or softly squealy Kenny Wheeler-like interval-shifts, seems ever more effortlessly fluid as the years pass.

The set's entrancing meditations embrace the dissonant and the singable, from the minimal 'Hypnagogic' to the lustrous and ballad-like 'Old Baby', the dreamy and then probingly restless 'Tumbleweed' and the ghostly, delicately long-toned title track - all Alessi/Weber duets confirming the pair's pensive empathy. 'Migratory Party' opens as a sequence of rising and falling paired notes before becoming a swerving quartet vehicle for sinewy avant-swing; the group's reflexes as a flat-out free-jazz band get sizzling workouts on the zigzagging 'His Hopes, His Fears, His Tears' and the brittle, wriggling 'Hanging By A Thread', while 'Residue' is probably the standout of this vibrant session, for the ways in which all four players merge their distinctive identities into glimpsed homages to the mid-1960s-Miles band's one-touch flow. Often low-key, but in Ralph Alessi's world, every sound counts.