The appearance of Lehman's octet at London's Vortex club was one of the standout gigs of 2011, and the highlight of the performance was a passage of solo saxophone during which he conspired to turn tone and breath into a multi-part horn section of its own. This stripped down setting reinforces any claim the 34-year-old New Yorker can make to being a noteworthy contemporary exponent of his instrument and brings as much of a focus to Lehman the player and improviser as his last release Travail, Transformation And Flow did to Lehman the composer. Imaginative reprises of hard swinging bop staples such as Coltrane's ‘Moment's Notice’ and Duke Pearson's ‘Jeannine’ confirm his ability to find a new way into a changes-led piece with the absent piano being felt more as liberating force than fl aw, while the originals again bring his writing ability to the fore. The highlight is ‘Foster Brothers’, a piece of astoundingly controlled aggression, in which all members of the trio create fluency amid a barrage of carefully planned hesitancy, whereby they frequently dead stop and breathe for nothing more than a half beat, thus evoking in sound a process of communication via rapid fire blinks of the eye. Damion Reid and Matt Brewer's punishing, funky syncopations are given extreme staccato roles, and the sense of escalating tension is enhanced in the latter stage of the piece when Lehman creates a markedly nasal, piercing tone to approximate something strangely similar to the high pitched scratch of a needle on a turntable. These moments where the saxophonist and his accompanists conjure the world of mechanised sound and the hardness of programmed beats are integral to Lehman's aesthetic. He summons up on ‘old’ instruments something of the starkness, the unfl inching sequential regularity prevalent in post-hip hop popular music, all the while staying unplugged. The result is acoustic music that feels electric, or a sense of electricity snaking through an acoustic sound environment. Lehman's straddling of these planes is done while acknowledging the ongoing relevance of swing, so that traditions are being extended and enriched rather than dispensed with. Deeply rooted in the past, this is nonetheless modernism with an all-seeing eye on the future.