In 1999, the iconoclastic American bassist and composer Reid Anderson released a quartet album called Abolish Bad Architecture featuring Jeff Ballard, Ethan Iverson, and Mark Turner. Abbreviated to its acronym (ABA), the title winked at the very thing it sought to dismantle: a preponderance of unimaginative forms in mainstream improvised music. As a co-founder of the alt-jazz collective The Bad Plus, Anderson would, over the ensuing decades, develop a reputation for unconventional structures in his tunes, often rooted in infectious melodies sitting atop beguiling diatonic harmonies.

With Decisions We Make, the second quartet album from the Hungarian-born, Vienna-based percussionist and composer András Dés, we have a new candidate for architectural disrupter-in-chief. Here is an album as satisfying to the head as it is to the heart, shot through with hummable tunes,  danceable grooves, and a jumbo crayon box’s worth of color. It is as much chamber music as it is jazz, and more than that, it is a formal wonder—bad architecture need not apply.

To begin, there is the intriguing road map of the album as a whole: the record unfolds as forty-eight minutes of continuous music, comprising eight tightly conceived compositions interleaved with free improvisations spirited into the world by Dés alongside his three brilliant collaborators: Philipp Nykrin on piano, Kenji Herbert on guitar, and Martin Eberle on trumpet. Among the many pleasures of this record is how seamlessly and inventively the group shifts gears from moments that are throughcomposed to those that have been invented in real time. It’s a testament to these four musicians that the free improvisations—and in particular, the set of four indexed as separate tracks (Homo Ludens I-IV)— feel as coherent and intentional as the eight tunes written by Dés.

Büntelem, which launches the album, introduces in miniature a series of tensions and contrasts that run through the entire disc. Our scene opens with pianist Nykrin declaiming a deceptively simple melody undergirded by slippery harmonies. When Dés enters, he’s playing a satellite drum (aptly  named!), its otherworldly tone evocative of an alpine cowbell. A minute later, he’s traded the drum for “toys,” as he calls them, struck with brushes and sounding like nothing so much as rats chewing their way through a pound of dessicated flesh. (The presence of Herbert’s tremolo’d guitar only increases the sense of low-grade anxiety.) This attention to color is a feature of the set: throughout the album, Dés is as likely to be heard playing goat nails and seed shakers as he is a ride cymbal. Indeed, within the first two minutes of the opening cut, we’ve already been exposed to a vast sonic universe, full of wonder and possibility.

As the tune progresses, a lazy saunter through summer heat becomes a somber prisoner’s march, before a trumpet solo gives way to gnarled chords: the sound of an amnesiac lost in a labyrinth but determined to find his way out. These harmonies melt into the first free improvisation, this one largely  a duet between piano and percussion. Here, as elsewhere, the absence of a dedicated bass instrument gives Nykrin wide latitude to reshape the harmonic field on a moment’s notice.

People in Places demonstrates Dés’ deft ability for musical world-building. First, there is a gamelanlike figure in the piano, groups of 8 and 7 eighth notes glued together with a dotted quarter note pulse running underfoot. There is something sinister, even paranoid in these harmonies. With Eberle unfurling elegant trumpet lines while Herbert’s guitar beetles along underneath, the texture is at once dense and transparent. Halfway through the tune, a more placid set of harmonies emerges in the piano, initially obscured by an insistent pedal-point. In time, the pedal relents, the  open chords take over, and we enter a realm of pure, anthemic joy, with piano and trumpet evoking a celebratory choir in a cathedral. But Dés is never content to do just one thing at a time, so he has Herbert shred over the anthem tune, fusillades of sixteenth notes slathered in distortion.

The second free improvisation, mostly a duet for piano and guitar, starts Jimi Hendrix and ends Cecil Taylor, with mournful long tones on the trumpet building a bridge into Brigittenauer Ballad. Here, in a showcase of Eberle’s gifts — from unadorned lyricism to pleading upper register yelps — is a slow waltz: a snowy night in a small town, lights twinkling over cobblestone streets. The main event here is a long guitar solo, Herbert’s tone warm and round, his lines elegant and unhurried. A stentorian piano solo follows, the quartet building to a climax as Dés sizzles underneath.

With the third collective improvisation comes one of the most impressive moments of the set. Like an Escher drawing or a transition in a Beethoven string quartet, single notes in the upper register of the piano transform imperceptibly into a walking bass line: Kurtág’s Játékok airlifted into a smoke-filled club. Angular canonic lines from trumpet and guitar follow, giving the feeling of an improvised fugue, before Nykrin settles into an obsessive, chromatic ouroboros, a snake chewing its tail. Indeed, it’s worth remarking here that each of these players is a remarkably disciplined improviser and listener: any idea that is put forward is gnawed down to the bone before being discarded.

In Banán Klub we have a skittering 5/8 joint: a cat strutting in the sun; Dave Brubeck if he were cool. We’re almost halfway through the record, and now it’s time for some unapologetic groove music.

In the final extended group improvisation, a counterpoint of ghostly trumpet and washed out guitar effects sleepwalks over the top of what feels like the canonic 6/4 chord in a romantic piano concerto. Dés enters with a metallic pulse, a rhythm sprinkler on a lush lawn. As the improvisation ends, Eberle plays so softly and with so much air that one might mistake his trumpet for an alto flute.

The final third of the album is as rewarding as everything that precedes it: Obsession Unlimited gives us a polyrhythmic étude that resolves into mid-tempo funk and jagged pointillism. Unspoken, one of the few miniatures in the set, is an elegant, loping waltz, featuring a gorgeously serpentine melody which disintegrates into shattered counterpoint. In Dad Jokes, a nervous ostinato is more menacing than funny, with trumpet and piano engaging in a musical gunfight, eventually giving way to another tight  5/8 groove and the return of that anthemic chord progression from People in Places.

With After the 20th, the album ends in a place of ambiguity, Eberle alternating keening howls in the upper register of the horn with stuttering unpitched noise. It’s hard to imagine a more appropriate or unsettling terminus for our era of uncertainty. 

Gabriel Kahane