These days artists struggle even in the specialist jazz press to gain coverage given the sheer richness and quantity of jazz the world over and also the segmentation and micro interests some jazz media have that can contribute to obscurity and a lot of preaching to the converted.

So some jazz media won’t cover avant jazz, some won’t really touch trad or mainstream, and only artists who have contracts with big record labels, or who hire publicists gain any sort of traction.

That’s particularly true of US and Canadian artists in Europe (although in the US few European acts have flickered into view since EST or Jamie Cullum). Many just don’t get coverage because no one actually knows or takes the trouble to push their careers or they can’t tour regularly enough to build up a following. It’s all very chicken and egg: how do you get a following without being out there in the first place? But equally how do you get out there in the first place?

I was thinking all the above despairingly while listening to Binary the new album from saxist/flautist Anna Webber whose album Simple I enjoyed a few years ago but who has had little profile this side of the Atlantic since. Like Simple this new album which is just as good, maybe even better, finds Webber (who sounds a little like Ingrid Laubrock) keeping musical company in pianist Matt Mitchell, and Claudia Quintet drummer John Hollenbeck, and the Internet-themed album has a pared down very open feel, the gimmick here that the title track was composed using numbers and letters produced by a random binary digit generator.

Mitchell, one of my favourite pianists, here reminds me of Marilyn Crispell a bit and Kris Davis as well. There is a great sense of exploration in Webber’s tunes, the ensemble interplay very much in the moment but the flavouring like Simple involving fractured, interlocking Anthony Braxton-like saxophone lines, rampant break-out passages of free improv on piano shuddered along by scampering drums.

The shape of the music, recorded in a Berlin studio back in May, is all, with no bass to tie the music down this album will probably only appeal to avant jazz fans and the general musical public will never hear it at all, which is simply their loss. Give me an Anna Webber album any day to the bland certainties of “near jazz” and star-making the majors much prefer fooling themselves that rehashes of the past are really what the public should be fed. Faced with the dullness of a lot of dinner jazz Binary is a welcome tonic, where the music and a process of sheer creativity is set free rather than held captive by corporate minds. And you know the shock is that it’s not even a wild free-for-all that might scare the horses: how conservative as listeners have we all become if we or rather an imposed record biz consensus think that this kind of music is too out there when really Webber and co are just doing what jazz is supposed to be doing: refusing to stand still or sheepishly accept the torpid status quo?

Released in late-October, listen to the opening track, above