Washington DC-based bassist Luke Stewart has already amassed a wildly eclectic discography that touches on post-rock, noise, art-punk and more. Yet, for all his forays into weird waters, he always seems to return to an intuitive, deeply held identification with the most nourishing roots of jazz. He’s in stimulating company leading this versatile trio featuring home-town compatriot, saxophonist Brian Settles, and the veteran Chicagoan drummer, Chad Taylor. Stewart’s avant-garde muscles are flexed on two contrasting, freely improvised pieces: the lengthy ‘Angles’ is an exercise in delicate restraint while ‘Circles’ is a brief burst of bullish free jazz.

But it’s as a master of the bottomless vamp that Stewart really glows. The album’s title track rolls along on an elastic bounce with just a hint of a 1950s Mingus church-holler about it. Most intoxicating, though, is ‘Roots’ – on which Stewart digs into a supremely funky, heavily syncopated groove with monomaniacal, undeviating determination, while Taylor whips up a dense tangle of rim-clacking polyrhythms and Settles floats long lines like distant vapour trails. It’s the same irrepressible, bodily joy that powers Stewart’s best-known project, the liberation-jazz ensemble, Irreversible Entanglements. Whatever the context, it’s always a major gas.