On ‘Breaking the Shell,’ Bill Frisell, Andrew Cyrille & Kit Downes get to expand their home base of creatively improvised music using the stately yet otherworldly sounds of the pipe organ.

‘Live in Someplace Nice’ is a welcome addition to the thin catalog of the short-lived endlessly inventive duo of Tim Berne and Bill Frisell.

Spin-offs usually aren’t as successful as the original thing. That axiom never applies to Ivo Perelman projects, though, and for ‘Duologues 1-Turning Point,’ a peak performing Perelman gets Tom Rainey’s best.

Jeff Oster, Vin Downes and Tom Eaton prove with ‘Seven Conversations’ that ambient or New Age music doesn’t have to be planned to be good.

Emphasizing a loosely-structured, open approach, the Tomeka Reid Quartet builds on the success of the prior two outings with ‘3+3.’

In creating ‘Worlds In A Life, Two’ on the fly, Thollem put the impulsiveness into this recycled music that you can’t get by pondering over it too long.

‘Lucid/Still’ captures a live performance of Tim Berne, Hank Roberts and Aurora Nealand’s unique brand of improvised chamber music.

By harnessing his love for surf rock and other, disparate music forms all at once, Simon Hanes and his Tsons of Tsunami is making the case for why we should enjoy this audacious mixture of styles, too.

‘Interaction’ really all of one big collection of amazing moments, a continuum of passion and a brainstorm of original ideas filtered through three highly trained instruments.

In the end, the Sunny Five’s ‘Candid’ is a jam record but in this case, the jams expose just how scary talented this assemblage truly is.