The adjective in the title has probably been attributed more to horn players and pianists – think Shorter or Monk so it’s refreshing to see a drummer stake his claim. Having said that, Tyshawn Sorey is arguably as much a composer and purveyor of ideas, and although he is confined to the kit for this session, his skills on the keyboard are not to be underestimated, as was proved on the ambitious, 2009 double album That/Not. If that set and its successor Koan demonstrated Sorey’s inclination to a stark, probing minimalism in which daringly spaced notes followed unpredictable, oddly set structures, then this latest work retains some of that character but recasts it in a more layered, much denser setting. As every piece carries a numerical title – from ‘Twenty’ to ‘Thirty Six’ it is tempting to surmise that themusic’s raison d’être is an exercise in convention-breaking time signatures, an assumption that may also be inferred from Sorey’s association with Steve Coleman, who he wilfully claims as an influence, alongside Stockhausen and Henry Threadgill, entre autres. But that doesn’t seem to be the real point. Several of the compositions have a very mutable pulse through their life cycle but they often retain a sense of groove, as if Sorey was contesting the premise that a clearly defined ‘one’ is the only way to suggest some kind of stability in meter.

If a backbeat and rubato play cat and mouse over barlines, then they create a feeling of dance, albeit a jittery one. There is as much shifting in the nature of the timbres, and the use of crashing low frequencies that shudder through short, clenched phrases gives the music the conceit of appearing to be played by a band bigger than a quartet, which is a trick that both Andrew Hill’s and Charles Mingus’ small groups also pulled off to great effect. Prone to using dissonant, if not jarring, grinding sounds that suggest a clash of keys, Sorey does not entirely excise this work of a blues sensibility and although a piece such as ‘Thirty Five’ has the kind of gaunt, if not slightly spectral tonalities that may conjure up the Webern-like progressives of classical music, the staggered, skilfully protracted drum figures have a character that could justifiably be called awkwardly funky. It is precisely the abundance of lines that have frequently fluctuations in length amid the swirl of strange harmonies that might well make Oblique-1 a challenging proposition for some, but for those willing to accept that Sorey appears intent on capturing some of the dizzying, disturbing flux of modern life, then this may be a rewarding listen.