As the whimsical determination that has propelled Carla Bley’s 60-year career edges her into her 80s, neither her productivity or the stealthy eloquence of her long-running trio with bassist Steve Swallow and the UK’s Andy Sheppard on saxes show a hint of fatigue. Life Goes On is a close but buoyantly independent relative of its 2013 predecessor Trios (a mix of Bley evergreens and new works) and 2016’s privately soulful Andando el Tiempo. The title suite (the first of three) opens with the slowest of slow blues, as Bley picks out an archetypically repeating low-end piano vamp inviting a softly slinky melody high on Swallow’s bass guitar, and then a Sheppard tenor solo of smoky exhalations and split-note blips. ‘On’ is a ballad-like lilt with a shapely piano break and a mournful tenor coda; ‘And On’ has a brightly prodding sax theme, a murmuring Swallow walk, and a headlong tenor break of seesawing figures and harmonic detours; while ‘And Then One Day’ starts as a tango and ends as a meditation. The three-part ‘Beautiful Telephones’ (Bley’s reflections on the Trump presidency) embraces a romantic movie opening and sardonic visits to ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’ and ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’, while the ‘Copycat’ suite, exploring the ageless jazz art of call-and-response, is the most conversationally playful feature of the set. This is a chamber group that could hardly sound more understated, but enduring vividness and wit have never wavered – or ever needed what the inimitable Bley herself calls ‘music’s temptations toward bombast and exaggeration’.