New York-based saxophonist Chris Speed’s career stretches back to the early 1990s and includes work with Claudia Quintet and Tim Berne’s Bloodcount, as well as his long-standing trio. Recently he’s been carrying out a creative audit of his work, revisiting past material and reinventing some of his favourite standards, which sit beside new compositions on Respect For Your Toughness. The first thing that strikes you about the record is Speed’s remarkable tenor sound. He squeezes notes – you hear the squeaks and the hisses as his mouth tightens around the reed – and when the note finally arrives it’s so vaporous it already sounds exhausted. The effect is haunting. It’s the sound of absence, of loss. He uses it to stunning effect on ‘Faint Tune’, which borrows ideas from ‘How High The Moon’, but renders them abstract with a time signature of 11, and on the standard ‘Can This Be Love?’, where the mood of weary melancholy makes you see the title in a different light. If there’s toughness to be found here it’s in the urgent, muscular grooves of bassist Chris Tordini and drummer Dave King, who crashes around his kit and fills the space left by Speed. They complement each other beautifully. In the liner notes, Peter Margasak describes the group as having reached a state of “preternatural ease, where technique, study and consciousness fall away and the spirit takes over.” You can hear it. There’s a masterful subtlety to the whole set.