Each of the eight tracks, whether short études or more substantial musical statements, share the composer’s vocabulary, technique and style in which subtle variations in every conceivable sound the sax can make, including audible breathing and the dramatic tension of extended silences, might (as in the aleatoric Sonates en arcs with its crooning simulating of the Greek double aulos) and usually does play an important role.

The études themselves are also wonderful musical experiences, as the short but delicious opening soliloquy of La main dans le souffle shows, but it is in the big set pieces, Jonction and Le Frêne égaré, that Rossé scores most impressively. Rich in multiphonics and microtonal lines, the former tails away in long, haunting stretches of silence. The latter, written in 1979, employs what Londeix called ‘the saxophone’s extraordinary idiomatic possibilities’ to piece together a musical narrative which, according to Estes, assistant professor of music at the University of Mississippi, ‘articulates a global acoustic effect of sound versus silence’.

It’s all a bit impersonal but never antiseptic, and always burns with the music’s intellectually heady designs. The fact that Estes’s playing has been informed not only by his own outstanding chops but by his interviews with Rossé, with whom he has collaborated on a number of compositions, and his developing his own études for budding young saxophonists who want to play Rossé’s music, makes the performances authoritative.