It’s hard to say why the organ trio has largely remained resistant to the lure of the avant-garde. Larry Young pushed the format deep into hard bop and modal from the mid-1960s, and later exploded into psychedelic jazz-rock with the Love, Cry, Want trio. More recently, Decoy, featuring Alexander Hawkins, have added a more experimental flavour, blending improv and deep grooves to thrilling effect. Now three of Manchester’s top improvisers have decided to have a go. This eponymous debut by Adam Fairhall, Mark Hanslip and Johnny Hunter bristles with ideas, delivered with a sly wit and unruffled confidence. Save for a mellow reading of Carla Bley’s ‘Ida Lupino,’ every track here is an original, ranging from Hanslip’s gospel-tinged ballad ‘Day of Rest’ to the fractured boogaloo of Hunter’s ‘April.’ But it’s on pieces like Fairhall’s ‘Pines’ that the trio most fully reveals its subversive intent as organ and sax slip free of harmonic constraints and improvise freely. Kudos, too, to Fairhall’s investigations into the timbral properties of the Hammond, as he employs various settings from warm, muffled swells to strange, polyphonic whistles. With so many layers of invention happening at once, it’s an album that demands close, repeated attention.