With breathe and wheeze and key-click we're off with ears spread, accumulating sonic detritus. Quiet Caroliner banjo-isms sidle up and nudge you. Oh-so gradually we get a coalescing mass of splayed assurances that things will indeed favor our attention. I'm shying away from making any reference to jazz-grass (or any other arcane genre-mashing) to apply my ear without attachments, and I'm finding myriad examples of intimate cross-breeding and careful application of the q quiet and the tiny.

Crawford's strings and Sullivan's percussives fill the spaces of Foster's saxing with beautiful filligree. There's a bit of Eric-Dolphy-on-a-bender motion on "Step 3: Align Resonators To Appropriate Heights", where the banjo decides it's time to bring up that time share agreement and flesh out the particulars. Does this sound like a good time to you? The ensuing firestorm threatens to engulf everything before it drops down in a quick and hot style. The ebb and flow here are excellent. These chaps are listening intently and responding in nimble and imaginative ways.

"Step 4: Shift Brackets To Proper Scale" is pretty much a display of quick-quick from the get-go. Foster sounds as if he's wringing the soprano sax to extract those precious drops of squirrely scree while Crawford imitates him. It's a jolly time. Sullivan's drumming is particularly sensitive here, underpinning and commenting in equal measure, and he knows when to lay out and let things exhale.

On the whole, this is a fine example of collective improvisation, and you could do much worse than to give it your full attention.