Drummer Whit Dickey – who power-drove the David S Ware Quartet throughout the early 1990s – has released some of his own finest work as a leader via the AUM Fidelity label. His 2000 album Life Cycle also featured Mat Maneri and Matthew Shipp, on that occasion in the company of saxophonist Rob Brown, and, 16 years on, Vessel In Orbit finds three master improvisers operating in intimate communion, all drawing on their long history. Eight tracks cram into 50 minutes and the expressive expanse of this music is held to account by the tautness of the emerging forms: not a single note is played in vain. Dickey has a penchant for space-related titles and his opening track, ‘Spaceship 9’, maps out directions into which the album might flow. A key tension surfaces almost from the get-go as the buckled, kinked temperament of Mat Maneri's microtonally conceived viola lines mix with the clean-cut equal temperament of Shipp's piano like oil blends with water. When Maneri enters, his alien tuning obscures rhythmic certainty, defying metric gravity as it slugs around an urgently reiterated note from Shipp. ‘To A Lost Comrade’ (but we're not told who) is emotionally direct like the rest of the album is not. This music otherwise projects an inscrutable, objectified and fleeting beauty that is utterly compelling – a soundworld unlike anything else in jazz.