Schlippenbach Trio: Bauhaus Dessau

German pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach's free-improvising trio, with percussion Paul Lovens and British saxophonist Evan Parker, has been around on and off for a remarkable 40 years. This set was recorded at the Bauhaus – a point made much of in the liner notes, showing how Bauhaus theories on space, enclosure, beginnings and endings chime with free-improv's narrative-disrupting methods. But it's inevitable that such a long-running partnership should develop its own personal narrative, and there are passages in these three long tracks in which the players banter and echo phrases as knowingly as any regular jazzers, or even offer a kind of distorting mirror to conventional pulses and grooves. Parker plays tenor sax throughout. He's gruffly lyrical at the opening but soon opens out into his characteristic jagged runs, gutturally swerving around Lovens's clanging cymbals and Schlippenbach's Cecil Tayloresque torrents, before evaporating into soft multiphonics toward the end of the 40-minute opener. The second track develops an eerily Latin groove, while on the third, dreamy, ballad-like swoops over cymbal-edge sounds and soft piano undulations turn stormy and then reflective again. It might be a little grizzled now, but one of the great free-jazz ensembles still throbs with life.