Formed several years ago in Cleveland, based in Brooklyn and comprising Greg Pattillo on flute, Eric Stephenson on cello and Peter Seymour on double bass, PROJECT Trio is an ensemble willing and able to touch on the gamut of musical bases ranging from Baroque to nu-Metal and taking in pretty much every stylism in between. Not a few of these are evident on ‘Random Roads Collection’, the trio’s fourth album and one that oozes versatility in abundance – ranging as it does from the minute’s worth of beatbox groove of My House to the eight-minute accumulation of variations which is Arco: Pizz and along the way taking in such numbers as the shimmering timbral interplay of Cherry Blossoms, the slow-burning though engaging workout of Visual Machine, the hardly ‘blue’ inflections of Grass, the gently evocative contrasts of Three Movie Scenes and the wrathful undertones of Teenie. Even the ‘cover version’, an agile take on Charles Mingus’s Fables of Faubus, takes no prisoners in its following the letter as opposed to the spirit of the music.

The disc is vividly recorded but not so that the music-making loses a necessary degree of perspective and focus, while the booklet gives little away other than personnel and venues (though the trio’s own website at projecttrio.com provides all the background one could wish). The only cavil might be the short playing time but this at least encourages one to approach the programme as a single entity – and one which makes for diverting as well as pleasurable listening.