With Ralph Alessi on trumpet, Florian Weber, piano, Linda May Han Oh on double bass, and Nasheet Waits, drums, there are a lot of big names on Lucent Waters.

Their coming together ought to work given the similar backgrounds many of these players have. However, dry, intense, and much more redolent of a sparsely attended overboiled chamber experience this instead betrays itself as a very frustrating listen and does not in the least.

Good bits, searching around, there are a few: Waits in the opening of ‘Melody of a Waterfall’, and Alessi tonally pristine and probing on ‘Butterfly Effect’. However there is no obvious sense of freedom let alone surprise on a record that takes far too long to say not very much.

The quartet just does not gel enough above all. Worst of all this has a parachuted-in quality and its level of introspection does not translate into anything approaching revelation — let alone demonstrable insight. SG