Having established himself as one of the 2000s' pivotal composer-improvisers with a series of small group recordings, American alto saxophonist Steve Lehman scales up for this session with France’s Orchestre National De Jazz, a big band directed by Frederic Maurin that has a long history of collaborating with progressive players. The match of ideas, talent and resources is gripping, above all because Lehman retains his trademarks all the while building new frameworks around them.

The ultra-precise sleight of rhythmic hand, where a blipped phrase appears almost as the result of a whimsical sample being momentarily switched off and on makes ‘Los Angeles Imaginary’ one of several highlights of the set as Lehman and Maurin’s writing conveys such a vivid sense of innate tension between humankind and technological advance, as previously intimated on 2005's Demian As Posthuman. The rub is that there is often a fraught funkiness locked into all the metric complexity, which is furthermore enhanced by drifting, swirling harmonies that are as ghostly as they are sensual, as if the swooning descent of Ellington’s ‘The Mooche’ were being recast from the age of wireless radio to the time of wireless laptops, complete with the crashing glitcherama of electronics done on the fly. The title Ex Machina is equally intriguing, given that these Latin words are usually preceded by Deus. Lehman has taken god out of the machine, and that can be perceived any number of ways. Maybe interventions are no longer divine. It is a perfect reckoning for the dread onset of AI.