This is not a pretty CD. Picasso's Guernica isn't pretty either. These great musicians are putting their egos aside in an effort to not just make great music,...to make music great,and make it as great as it can be (When did Jackson Pollack know when he was done with painting?). It would have been better if I could here more bass and some titles are stupid. Still a super CD, buy it!

A Seattle sextet of shrewd conceits and palpable empathy, Frieze of Life alternates between nearly indistinguishable group improvisations and compositional strategies (while also sneaking in a couple of themes by Bela Bartok). Adept at ear-catching harmonies, the four horns (saxophonists Greg Sinibaldi and Mark Taylor, trumpeter Jay Roulston and trombonist Chris Stover) adapt with striking sensitivity to the contours of the moment, and solos don't intrude but rather complement the mood. Bass (Geoff Harper) and drums (Byron Vannoy) often attack from an oblique angle, offering ostinati that sustain momentum or motoric rhythms to energise the group-think.

I’m not sure where on earth the phrase “nuclear frog pond” comes from – probably leader Greg Sinibaldi’s own head – but the band name is a lift from Edvard Munch, which perhaps explains the music’s surprising darkness of texture and mood, very different from what one might expect from a four-horns-plus-bass-and-drums jazz ensemble. Listeners may be reminded of Dave Douglas’s jazz-goes-to-the-Old-World aesthetic, and Sinibaldi, like Douglas, includes a few modern-classical arrangements in the program (in this case, some Bartók). Pieces like “Desire” and “Code Name 6” are built up layer by layer in the manner of a round, until all six instruments are present and accounted for; and even the collectively credited pieces – wholly improvised, I assume – tend to be slowmoving, close-voiced canons, each horn taking turns to throw a new note into the pot. It’s a strong and unusual disc, with excellent work from all concerned (Sinibaldi on tenor sax and bass clarinet, Mark Taylor on soprano, alto and tenor, Chris Stover on trombone, Jay Roulston on trumpet, Geoff Harper on bass and Byron Vannoy on drums). These are players who really listen to each other – it’s impressive how they spin intricate chorales out of thin air. But I’m also left feeling the music’s not quite there yet, for several reasons, first and foremost being the concentration on sonorous, melancholy canons to the point of redundancy – I could have used more explosive moments like “Moose Knuckles”, “Hitler’s Café” and the last half of “Claude et Eric”, where the tasteful after-you interaction is ditched and they all just jump in. Elsewhere the emphasis on the horns makes the bass and drums seem underused and occasionally superfluous – on “Consolation” for instance the drummer isn’t really given enough to do – and many of the pieces lack internal contrast, or don’t go far enough past their initial premises. That’s a long list of cavils, yet on balance I’d still recommend the disc: such weaknesses are apparent cumulatively over the course of the album, but make little difference to individual tracks’ success. This is smart, unhackneyed music from a band whose future progress will be worth following.—Nate Dorward