Italian saxophonist Roberto Ottaviano's Sideralis opens by conspicuously upending jazz convention. The rhythmic underlay provided by piano, bass and drums would normally establish a time-grid over which melody and harmony mesh; but ‘Vulpecula’ builds a jagged groove through erratically repeated loops of additive melody, thrusting Gerry Hemingway into an unusual role: time keeping is self-defining, which allows his pitch-aware drums to contribute to the emerging counterpoint of line against line. Ottaviano's shrill tone, in unison with Alexander Hawkins' slapped high-register piano, puts you in mind of Anthony Braxton and, indeed, the modular structure of ‘Vulpecula’ has echoes of Braxton's Ghost Trace pieces. ‘Planet Nicols’ (Herbie presumably, rather than Red) and ‘Planet John Lee Hooker’ are more conventionally configured, and Ottaviano's urbane soprano-playing etches a satisfying whole out of the stutter-start surface of the Nicols piece, while his melodically opulent orbit around Planet John Lee stands out (even if the stylistic backstory is harder to pin down). Programmed last, the title track finds Ottaviano's breathless tone and pitchless key-noise skating over Michael Formanek's tender bass caresses and the delicate ice of Hemingway's cymbals as the piece gathers together a harmonic direction. Ottaviano also offers generous solo space: ‘Ellingtonia’ sounds like a line-drawing paraphrase of Money Jungle, with Hawkins' stabbing piano and Formanek's clustered basslines evoking Ellington and Mingus to perfection, while Hawkins' fluid counterpoint swims around Hemingway's ethereal mouth harp on ‘On The Harmonica Wake’.