Vancouver-born composer and flautist-saxophonist Anna Webber's intrepidly personal music of recent years has plenty of jazz's improvisational momentum about it (as well as jazz practitioners like Matt Mitchell and Ches Smith from the Tim Berne circle, and the innovative drummer-composer John Hollenbeck), but her 2019 release Clockwise referenced Cage, Stockhausen, Varese and Xenakis rather than Mingus or Monk, and Idiom is inspired by experimental woodwind techniques rather than any individual artist's methods.

Disc One of this double-set is performed by Webber's eight year-old Simple Trio (herself, Mitchell, and Hollenbeck), Disc Two by a 12 piece band mixing horns and classical strings. The trio section's opener juggles looping flute minimalism and interlocking piano patterns, alternations of teeming intensity and abrupt halts, and long, swoopingly agile flute improvisations. The trio's five sections also span tenor sax multiphonics negotiating Mitchell's and Hollenbeck's arrhythmic jolts, gloweringly emphatic or erratically playful grooves that recall Tim Berne (‘Forgotten Best‘), and rising and falling tenor probings that become a quirkily catchy kind of avant-jig.

Disc Two, for the large group, segues lamenting deep sounds punctuated by squealed exclamations and tuba blasts that turn into raucously rocking free-jazz, graceful polyphonic ensemble weaves driven by striding drum grooves, a pensive trumpet rumination mushrooming into a swirling multi-brass dance, and a dark, pulsating finale of overlapping extended tones that takes on the character of a long single exhalation. Idiom's borderlines of jazz, abstract improv and contemporary-classical experimentation constantly blur, but Anna Webber's ideas-packed navigation of them invites you to stop worrying about any of that.