Julie Sassoon's European quartet certainly sounds like a postbop-to-free jazz band in its piano/horn/rhythm instrumentation, the punch of its ensemble-playing, and the agility with which its squeezes and stretches a pulse. Yet, as the expat UK pianist/composer has been demonstrating for much of the past two decades since her relocation to Berlin, Sassoon's take on jazz can sound both familiar and unfamiliar. Originally classically trained, Manchester-born Sassoon's improv phrasing and compositional sense nowadays is as likely to be shaded by Steve Reichian minimalism or Egberto Gismonti's eclectic music as by Keith Jarrett or Keith Tippett. Voyages, featuring six Sassoon originals, was recorded in a narrow lockdown-lifted window in November 2020. The distinctive way Sassoon develops complex materials is plain from the session's opening track, 'Missed Calls' - where bumpily alternating approaches to accenting 5/4 buoy up the shivery runs, grainy timbres and skidding elisions of Lothar Ohlmeier's tenor, resolving in a tightly chattery fast-rising melody - but the piano solo that follows isn't linear postbop, but for a long while a chimingly metallic trill. On 'Shifting', Meinrad Kneer's whistling, ghostly arco bass improv leads into a film-noirish reverie, while 'Waltz With Me' is a jubilant wide-interval sax-led dance that scurries through rhythm switchbacks into skittish free-improv. The long 'Jerusalem' is a dreamy free-form tone-poem that spotlights Ohlmeier's expressive range, and the closing 'Melody' is first a squally, surging, ensemble jam and then a subtle meditation. In the diversity of its routes and destinations, Voyages is a major understatement as a title.