The title suggests sketchiness but this music is anything but sketchy. Saxophonist Dee Byrne's often intricate compositions and her choice of colleagues combine throughout Outlines to create a fulsome sound rich in textures and musical ideas. The outlines, it seems, were the drawings Byrne drew to inspire her writing of the music.

All the members of the sextet (especially Byrne herself) are well-respected players and thus, for all the meticulous thought that must have gone into its composition, each track bursts with collective and individual spontaneity. It makes for an engagingly heady mixture as things take shape, melt down and then re-form or move into new places, all the while allowing the players’ individual personalities to clearly emerge.

It's a creatively disruptive process, exemplified on tracks like the extended ‘We Are Experiencing Turbulence’ with Rebecca Nash's plonking insistent piano and a fearsome three-way horn explosion and some scrabbling trumpet from Nick Malcolm that resolves into a gentle chorale over bowed bass. There's great use of texture, with Tom Ward's eloquent bass clarinet often woven to Olie Brice's meticulous bass, as on the hard-edged ‘Don’t Mess With Me’, a time-shifting track where Byrne lets rip with a fine extended Dolphy-ish solo.

The album closes with elegant restraint in ‘The Dance’, an almost classical fugue with Andrew Lisle's clockwork drumming belying his splendidly roistering contributions throughout. Overall this album is a fine example of how to catch the freshness of improvisatory music within the discipline of imaginative composition. You’ll immediately want to hear it again, and you’ll want to see them on stage even more.