Pursuing greatness

Tenorist Erica Lindsay is one. Listen to the beauty that she blows on her Candid label album Dreamer.

Altoist Vi Redd of Los Angeles is another and it was not for nothing that she declared that women "are taking up instruments. You see more of it now, but there is... the glass ceiling. But, like all injustices, we're going to have to pursue, pursue, pursue."

Well, in hot pursuit is altoist Matana Roberts of Chicago, who grew in her artistry alongside some of the powerful and veteran brethren of the Chicago-based Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), pioneers of free jazz improvisation, who were determined to reach out to and take inspiration from the Windy City's black community.

Roberts's new album The Chicago Project is a tribute to her home city and features three bandmates strongly active in Chicago's progressive musical life.

Josh Adams is the bassist, the guitarist is Jeff Parker and Frank Rosaly of Ken Vandermark's Crisis Ensemble plays the drums.

The guest saxophnonist is a local legend and co-founder of the AACM, tenorist Fred Anderson, who was making ground-breaking albums 40 years ago and rarely left Chicago, opening live venues and helping to build up a thriving free jazz tradition.

His most famous club was The Birdhouse, where no alcohol was served, much to the perplexity and chagrin of the Chicago police, who so frequently raided it.

Opening track Exchange begins with a fierce, vibrating cadence before Abrams's striding bass leads the quartet forward, Parker plays an enigmatic break and Matana winds slowly back, her alto blowing through unexpected pathways beside Rosaly's crashing drums.

In Thrills, she and Parker prompt each other through an urgent improvised dialogue, while, in the much milder and more lyrical sounds of Norma, the conversation continues, mollified and gentle, from both alto and guitar.

Anderson's contribution to the album is in three unaccompanied duets with Matana.

Fittingly, they are called Birdhouse 1, 2 and 3, three saxophone colloquies that make fascinating listening.

They blow with the closest of empathies, calling and responding to each other, alternately leading, following and chiming out in unison.

Anderson is 78 and a jazzman of huge experience. Matana is a young woman. They are several generations apart, yet they play as siblings, discovering new dimensions of jazz language and artistic connection in every breath.

So intense and capacious is their duo that its fullness dominates the entire album and, when the quartet returns, despite its excellence, you miss Anderson's huge authority and you realise again the power of his sound through its absence.

Yet this is not to deny the power of the quartet tracks. In Love Call, Matana coaxes all kinds of sounds from her horn.

During the first part of the performance, it is as if she is playing a restrained, almost courtly and detached love theme. Then, suddenly, the mood changes, charged by Vasly's ebullient drums.

She strains for a terser, wilder timbre and finds it, her notes becoming more raw and abrasive, racked with emotion.

In South By West, she accepts the challenge of melodism, blowing out the lucid theme before returning to another duet with Parker after Adams's twanging solo.

An engrossing album, this, and a new breath, a new saxophone voice sparking new areas of sound and creation and growing in power through association with a seasoned and acknowledged master. A new mistress of the reed, her sound full of strength and beauty.

CHRIS SEARLE