Down Beat Beyond albums of the year.

Featuring bassist Michael Formanek, drummer/vibraphonist Tomas Fujiwara, and guitarist Mary Halvorson, Thumbscrew brings together three of jazz’s busiest and most acclaimed improvisers. City of Asylum has provided an oasis of concentrated time “and it’s such a luxury to develop this music in that environment,” says Halvorson. “We really have a flow with that, a system with how we work. We all arrive with our music fully or partially composed. From day one there are daily rehearsals, working through the material with the goal of recording. That’s been the process for all of the albums after the first one.”

From its inception, Thumbscrew possessed a singularly mobile, slippery sound. The repeated City of Asylum sequestrations have allowed the trio to deepen that elastic sense of time while honing new works with an attention to detail that would otherwise be unattainable. Knowing they’ll have concentrated time together “means there are zero limitations on what I write for the group,” Fujiwara says. “It takes out any voice in my head asking ‘Are we really going to get this? Is this asking too much?’” With each composer represented by three tunes, the album is a gorgeous, consistently enthralling dispatch from jazz’s creative frontier.

“This is the second album where we’ve composed for the vibes,” Formanek says. “It’s been fun to see Tomas take that on, and he put in an incredible amount of work to make it a viable option. Even having an unusual take on a guitar trio, it’s still a guitar trio. With the vibes, I think about the Red Norvo Trio with Tal Farlow and Mingus. This is totally different, but we’re still working with those colors.”