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.

‘Live’ proves that adding Ed Kuepper to a very good acoustic jazz piano trio transforms Asteroid Ekosystem into an experimental, improvisation-heavy rock outfit.

Ivo Perelman and cohorts prove that sax, trumpet, vibes and stringed instruments can coalesce around spontaneous ideas, if you get the right guys together.

André 3000 didn’t enter the studio intending to make an ‘Alice Coltrane’ or ‘Jon Hassell’ album, he simply followed his muse. If only more high profile artists did this.