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.

Satoko Fujii, Taiko Saito and Yuko Oshima are three wellsprings of creativity who as Trio San joined forces to find new ways to make uncommonly compelling music.

Ivo Perelman is up to his usual tricks o ‘Molten Gold,’ making up melodies on the run with trombone great Ray Anderson for four amazing improvisations.

‘Catching Ghosts’ with Majid Bekkas and Hamid Drake is a fine keepsake from Peter Brötzmann’s recent comeback, capturing an old soul taking chances with a fire still in his young heart.

‘Oceans And’ intrigues because it’s a meld of sounds that don’t normally go together, and delights because it goes together so well in the hands of Tim Berne, Aurora Nealand and Hank Roberts.