By his own account, attending a Max Roach solo concert in 1980 changed Ramon Lopez's musical life – his later participation in the Freedom Now Sextet certainly suggests a debt to Roach and his influence. Not that the Spanish drummer and percussionist's musical life has ever been predictable or a matter of rote: beginning as a self-taught drummer, he has since studied tabla and taught Indian music, recorded Spanish Civil War songs and generally challenged jazz and musical conventions in myriad ways. Recorded in a day, his latest project, the fittingly titled Threefold, features a trio of musicians – Lopez, Percy Pursglove (on trumpet and flugelhorn) and Rafa³ Mazur (on acoustic bass) – and, in the best tradition of improvised music, could be said to sound like a meta-celebration of the very act of musical becoming. The likes of ‘The Garden Of Earthly Delights’ are moodily experimental, while there's a real sense of suspense and anticipation about the Lopezcomposed ‘Bacchanal’, which is driven forward by Mazur's rolling bass figures but, rather magically, never appears to move on; Pursglove's trumpet exhortations fly up gleefully, but Mazur and Lopez's interlocked rhythm work keeps the whole thing satisfyingly grounded.