The American West Coast has long cultivated its own sound of improvisation. From saxophonist Paul Desmond and pianist Dave Brubeck’s counter-be bop, ‘cool’ sound of the 1950s to composer Horace Tapscott’s avant garde Pan African People’s Arkestra of the ‘60s and ‘70s, to the 2010s sound of saxophonist Kamasi Washington’s maximalist, hip-hop influenced fusion, Los Angeles, San Francisco and the surrounding coastal cities have always marched to a beat and melody of their own making.

The latest incarnation of this West Coast music is centered on percussionist and producer Carlos Niño. Longtime host of an eclectic radio show on independent station KPFK and co-founder of online station Dublab, Niño has spent the past two decades as a champion and matchmaker for some of LA’s most freewheeling and expansive artists. Collaborating with the likes of violinist Miguel Atwood Ferguson, electronic producer Flying Lotus, beatmaker Madlib, saxophonist Sam Gendel and rapper André 3000, Niño’s work straddles the worlds of spiritual jazz and free form improvisation to produce a fresh imagining of New Age ambience. 

For his newest combo, Niño joins forces with regular collaborators guitarist Nate Mercereau and saxophonist Josh Johnson to create a trio operating purely on the concept of openness. First playing together in 2011 at an outdoor gig in an orange grove in California, the group have since appeared as band members in larger ensembles on Niño’s “Friends” records and have discovered kindred spirits in the freedom of their improvisatory mentality – letting motifs and whispered rhythms lead each composition in whatever direction their inspiration flows. 

Across the five longform tracks of their debut album, “Openness Trio”, Niño, Mercereau and Johnson delve deeper into this musically liberated ideology than ever before. With each composition recorded during different sessions around Los Angeles and Ventura county – from the outdoor hills of Ojai, where the trio first played over a decade ago, to an intimate living room setting in Elysian Park, an oak tree orchard, a courtyard of an Echo Park home, and a recording session under a pepper tree at Elsewhere in Topanga Canyon – the resulting five tracks channel these intimate, natural settings to produce delicately unfurling arrangements that highlight the group’s innate, wordless connection.

Opener “Hawk Dreams” sets the tone with Mercereau’s looped guitar motif providing an insistent rhythm beneath Johnson’s swirling saxophone lines and Niño’s textural cymbal washes and shaker riffs. As the nine-minute track builds, melodies interject like rays of sunlight through murky overhead clouds, delivering soaring distorted guitar harmonies and siren-like saxophone fanfares, all coalescing to ultimately break down and dissolve into silence. 

As the album continues, the trio prove themselves to be masters of this undulating form, building and breaking from ambience to cacophony. On “Anything Is Possible”, for instance, Niño’s breath provides percussive counterpoint to Johnson’s languorous saxophone melody, layering a sense of tension before dissolving into gong beats and twitters of bird song, while “Chimes In The Garden” stacks skittering rain sticks and sprightly flute melody over reverberating guitar chords, evoking a cinematic soundworld of passing beauty – like a blurred, majestic landscape viewed through the window of a speeding car. 

There are equally moments of quietude and respite, with “Openness” gently arranging woozy, electronically-processed guitar chords over synthesised saxophone and swishing drum brushes to produce a meditative three minutes of warm introspection. Yet, it’s on closing track “Elsewhere” that the trio explode into the full power and potential of their open-ended sound, combining rolling tom sticking with bird calls and lyrical saxophone motifs, artfully developing over a 10-minute runtime to reach a crescendo of wailing synth lines and sweeping cymbal sounds. Buffeting the listener like gusts of wind, the trio harness their natural surroundings to enliven those of us hearing their song. 

Throughout the entire “Openness” album, Niño, Mercereau and Johnson ultimately produce a record of delicate balance and form, created without any structure or arrangement previously in mind. It is testament to the freest edges and boundaries of improvisation – proof that conviction can come from a credo of open acceptance and that vigour and intensity can be created within some of the most delicate and dynamically gentle music you are likely to encounter. To meet the Openness Trio with open ears is to be fully immersed in a new world of jazz that extends far beyond the West Coast scene and into the essence of what might be produced through improvisation itself.

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Ammar Kalia is a writer and musician. He is the Guardian’s Global Music Critic and writes for the Observer, Downbeat, Jazzwise and others. His debut novel, A Person Is A Prayer, is out now.

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_{Header image: Nate Mercereau, Josh Johnson, Carlos Niño (Openness Trio). Photo: Todd Weaver.}