With a galaxy of stellar pop and rock names from Lady Gaga through to Steve Tyler on his CV, the Grammy-nominated LA-based bassist and multi-instrumentalist Billy Mohler doesn’t try, or perhaps even have time, to get his jazz mojo up and running too often.

This new album Anatomy is only his band’s second, a follow-up to Focus in 2019. Although it has its more meditative ‘spiritual’ jazz-y moments, for the most part, it’s powered along by Mohler’s big bass grooves/riffs and Nate Wood’s steamy rock-fuelled drums. Both are ex-members of successful mainstream rock band The Calling and their immovable head-nodding grind combined with Mohler’s direct, earworm tunes sets the scene for a couple of freewheeling improvisers to hitch a ride on. There’s few better suited to that task than saxophonist Chris Speed, with his experience in cutting-edge alt. rock-influenced downtown ensembles such as Human Feel and AlasnoAxis through to Tim Berne’s Bloodcount, while trumpeter Shane Endsley is best known as a founding member of Kneebody, something he has in common with Nate Wood.

There’s plenty of free-jazz-on-a-groove solo slots as well as collective dialogue between the pair, but for me there’s something unremarkable and limited in scope about this approach over an entire album that adding a chordal instrument might have solved by providing some additional textural or structural interest, one of the strengths of Mohler’s band members’ aforementioned downtown ensembles.