For John Escreet’s fifth recording since the impressively ambitious debut Consequences in 2008, the New York jazz scene’s hottest English import is his usual inventive hybrid of restless eclecticism and wittily episodic arrangements. But the feeling is this time that on Sabotage and Celebration Escreet has created a better balance between the cerebral and more intuitive sides of his music. Chris Potter and Jim Black are new additions that demonstrate Escreet’s fast growing profile as a creative bandleader and pianist. The album starts on an ominous chamber strings arrangement, a new colour in the Escreet palette, but a side to his work he has been exploring recently. It leads seamlessly into ‘He Who Dares’, a quite brilliant, classy ‘standard’ of the future, with its zigzagging highly melodic phrases and fusion-y ensemble harmonic base that sounds something like a cross between Frank Zappa and the Brecker Bros. On it Potter blows a peach of a solo, like he’s sitting in with one of Gil Evans’ funky 1970s ensembles. Elsewhere ‘Animal Style’ has the jagged momentum of New York’s cutting edge avant jazz circuit, while also highlighting the more spikily percussive side to Escreet’s piano playing, while ‘Beyond Your Wildest Dreams’ goes from a sleepy free-bop Wayne Shorter-ish theme into a string-backed Michel Legrand-like watery piano melody that demonstrates the quality as well as breadth of his writing. It’s a little bit unusual, but satisfying, to be able to tell the band’s horn players apart so easily; both Binney on alto, a mentor of Escreet’s, and Potter are that distinctive. Just one of the reasons why Sabotage and Celebration is one of the contemporary jazz highlights of 2013.