With his Fellow Creatures album in 2016, Danish virtuoso Jasper Høiby (bassist with the thrilling European power trio Phronesis) showed he had a formidable composer’s imagination, restless for wider horizons. With Planet B, Høiby begins a sequence of four albums set to occupy him for the next five years, devoted to big themes bearing on humanity’s prospects on the planet. Electronics sometimes unleashes stirring harmonies that make this trio – Høiby on double bass and effects, the increasingly excellent Josh Arcoleo on tenor, and France’s Marc Michel on drums – recall a big declamatory ensemble like Charlie Haden’s Liberation Orchestra.

But most often, this superb band reminds me of The Trio, the free-improvising but also powerfully thematic group of the early 1970s joining saxophonist John Surman, bassist Barre Phillips, and drummer Stu Martin. Arcoleo has never sounded more majestically unleashed, and all three are in uncanny rapport – whether on dark arco-bass chords and long-tone swirls under spoken-word passages on human hope and destiny, snorting free-sax eruptions over racing double-time percussion, or slow brasslike choruses through which Høiby’s pizzicato darts and twists. There are a few imported speeches (notably from cultural-evolution guru Charles Eisenstein), but Høiby’s pieces envelop them so beautifully that you can love them or leave them without it mattering to the music at all. I tend to the Stravinsky line on music-as-message (‘’music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all… that is by no means the purpose of its existence”), but this is a wonderful Jasper Høiby milestone whichever way you lean over that.