When the great African American pianist Cecil Taylor spent a month with some of Europe’s most inventive experimenters in Berlin in the summer of 1988, it felt like a free-jazz milestone. The event seemed to symbolise the ways that Taylor’s, John Coltrane’s and Ornette Coleman’s escapes from traditional song-forms in the 1950s had opened up a stunning international soundworld – in which Coltrane could be segued with John Cage, or Anthony Braxton with funk, mingling 20th-century classical ideas, folk music and free-improv, electronics, avant-rock and more.

The Polish-born German alto and soprano saxophonist Angelika Niescier grew up with that transformative swirl around her, and found an illustrious career in it. This Chicago-recorded set with the prodigious cello and drums pairing of Tomeka Reid and Savannah Harris is the latest to swell Niescier’s packed discography, a list that since the millennium has joined trailblazing European and American partners on sharp-end original music, film soundtracks, nods to Coleman, Braxton and other pioneers, and sometimes all-out freefall.

The seven Niescier originals here span fast, jagged pieces with abruptly interval-vaulting themes, voice-like tone poems of quiet sax exhalations or key-fluttering sounds like beating wings, looping repeat patterns that build to percussive thrashes. The 11-minute Hic Svnt Dracones passes through whooping fast alto lines to dark, atonal, skidding cello figures, and on to a pounding finale, while Oscillating Madness is almost choral in its shivery-bowed cello chords and barely breathed sax tones.

A Dance, to Never End, a repeating horn line picked up and harmonised by the cello, winds up in a storm of tumultuous drumming. Free jazz and immense improv expertise from these three drive the urgent clamour of this music, but a composer’s ear gives it shape, drama and contrast that hold the attention tight.

from www.theguardian.com