Bernhard Lang’s title might lead you to think classic-period modernism but Monadologie XII turns out to be a composer’s re visioning of jazz. We slip into terrain previously occupied by Stravinsky’s Ebony Concerto, Milhaud’s La création du monde and Bernstein’s Prelude, Fugue and Riffs, but not entirely comfortably. Lang clearly has a healthy respect for jazz. He knows that an Austrian composer writing in 2011 had better keep some circumspect distance from his source material to avoid sponging off jazz’s irresistibly charismatic surface and thereby becoming a dilettante. And it is this cool composerly distance, the hot inner workings of jazz revealed only gradually, that makes Monadologie XII such an unusually stimulating and emotionally uplifting experience.

But we’re kept guessing. GOD Records issues Monadologie XII on vinyl (with a CD version discreetly tucked into the package). Stark white lettering imprinted against the jet-black grain of the double-fold LP cover offers no guidance apart from namechecking the 10 players of Klangforum Wien, and the first set of sounds you hear are appropriately ambiguous. An open-ended accordion chord frames an alto saxophone’s hectic but subtone acrobatics. A trumpet stab and cymbal splash drop their bluesy clues. But this could equally be an ensemble composition happy to exist in the same world as Lachenmann or Spahlinger – especially when a piano asserts its disruptive presence.

Monadologie XII is already dealing in jazz before anybody particularly notices. Melodic cells are asserted and re spun. Grooves appear in the cracks between melodic lines determinately on the move. A mesmeric solo double-bass passage breaks free from the ensemble. Drum-kit patterns spark into life and abruptly fizzle out. Lang is breaking down the material basis of jazz to rebuild it in his own vision. Throwing around the weight of jazz cliché, which is how jazz-inspired composers tend to operate, is not his bag. Klangforum Wien have previously recorded Monadologie VII (Kairos, 3/11), which similarly filters and distils Schoenberg, the big difference here being that performative jazz sounds are not accessible from notated sources. And so Lang must rely on his ears – and he more than swings it.