The innovative American percussionist/composer Dan Weiss has long been making absorbing jazz out of composing group music from drum patterns outwards. Even Odds now deploys those methods in even bolder ways.

Weiss divides 20 short episodes here between six relatively conventionally-written pieces inviting improv variations from virtuosic Latin/bop saxist Miguel Zenón and awesomely eloquent Tim Berne piano protegé Matt Mitchell, and 14 fragmentary game-like challenges (the press release calls them ‘rhythmic dares’) pre-recorded by Weiss at the drums, and then spontaneously reacted to by his partners. Zenón snaps out short, staccato chatters, spurring torrential Mitchell rejoinders, against Weiss’s rhythmic fusillades on the opening ‘What It Is’, while the gracefully mournful ‘The Children of Uvalde’ (a response to the 2022 US school shooting) is a more songlike piece evoking a soft piano sway under lyrical long-tone sax swoops.

‘Horizontal Lifestyle’ and ‘Vertical Lifestyle’ compare what happens in this creative lineup when the first is only a glinting, murmuring sax/piano dialogue without the drum part that originally impelled it, while the latter brings all three components together. ‘Bu’ is a skimming, boppish tribute to Art Blakey, and ‘Ititrefen’ is a trio genuflection to Wayne Shorter - it’s ‘Nefertiti’ spelled backwards, and cherishes that classic in its edgily lyrical, slowly-tolling pulsations, tender sax sighs and soft piano chords.

The Japanese zero-sum game of ‘Scissors, paper, rock’ is pictured on the cover of Even Odds, and with good reason: the musicianly game-lover Weiss keeps making unique contemporary sounds from the creative vicissitudes of mixing planning, intuition, and chance.