Berlin-based reeds player, Frank Gratkowski, moves equally freely in both avant-jazz and New Music circles, displaying a Braxton-esque ability to blend the spontaneity of the former with the structural concerns of the latter. The Anthony Braxton connection is most obvious on Le Vent Et La Gorge, recorded with a quartet including drummer Gerry Hemingway who played in the venerable Chicagoan's quartet from 1983 to 1994. Across 12 compositions, Gratkowski contrasts notated passages of sustained group tones with complex anti-grooves constructed from tightly interlocking yet somehow counter-intuitive shapes – over which he declaims writhing clarinet solos. The title track is a patchwork of sliding tones, quick-fire bursts of extended technique and boisterous shouts: a statement that's both scholarly and irreverent at the same time. The pieces recorded in a trio with Chris Brown and William Winant on Vermilion Traces sound even more like contemporary classical composition – with delicate, interwoven sounds coaxed from overblown clarinet, bowed vibraphone and piano innards – but are actually spontaneous group improvisations executed with impressive clarity and patience. On the second disc, Donaueschingen 2009, Austrian composer Gerhard E. Winkler uses interactive computer software in his 20-minute composition ‘Bikini Atoll’ to generate instantaneous reactions from the trio. But it's Gratkowski's Fo[u]r Alto project that offers the most imaginative synthesis: a saxophone quartet that avoids the usual dialogues of call-and-response or solo-group-solo, instead locking into shimmering, soundscapes with all four horns working together to explore the complex micro-intervals of just intonation. Frank Gratkowski has ideas to burn.