For those unaware, in his review of Mark Turner’s last quartet effort for ECM, 2022’s Return From The Stars, the Swiss daily Weltwoche’s Peter Ruedi described the program as “the leanest, most concentrated, and most inspired improvised chamber music imaginable.”

It’s a fitting description of the tenor saxophonist’s powerful quartet endeavors, which seem to have arrived at their most sophisticated and hard-hitting on Patternmaster, an album that in many respects feels like a continuation and expansion of the group’s last recording.

Both boundless improvisation and cool control are driving motors behind a quartet that has molded its common musical understanding over years on the road and in the studio.

1. Patternmaster [06:02]
2. Trece Ocho [09:55]
3. It Very Well May Be [06:24]
4. Lehman’s Lair [06:09]
5. The Happiest Man On Earth [07:38]
6. Supersister [12:15]

The highly inventive saxophonist, who found acclaim with his meticulous, harmonically rich approach to modern creative jazz, here within the confines of his longstanding quartet of Jason Palmer (trumpet) Joe Martin (bass), and Jonathan Pinson (drums), opens this recording on the spiritedly impassioned titular Patternmaster and the more emotively sculptured Trece Ocho and then we get brought forth the veritably firefly of a cut in It Very Well May Be, the playful, yet pensively-hued Lehman’s Lair, the set rounding out on the languishing beauty of The Happiest Man On Earth, coming to a close on the soaring, yet always controlled, always dutifully embodied, 12 minute Supersister.

“The more you trust, the more chances you can take and the deeper you can go with people,” says the leader, who feels that within this group’s chemistry he can go “beyond craft and gage into the art of music more in depth.”

Mark Turner Jazz @ Facebook