Ches Smith: Laugh Ash – thrilling, unpredictable album that plays by its own extravagant set of rules

The California-born, New York-based drummer, percussionist and composer Ches Smith is hard to pin down. In a good way. He has worked with fellow jazz forward thinkers such as Tim Berne, Mary Halvorson and Kris Davis; he is a crucial component of the guitarist Marc Ribot’s splendidly noisy avant-rock trio Ceramic Dog; and he has ventured widely and deeply into the often rhythmic soundworlds of electronic music, contemporary composition and Haitian voodoo. “Postgenre” is a term that was almost invented for such a multivoiced polymath.

Laugh Ash, Smith’s 11th album as leader, continues his love of integrating, often in stark juxtaposition, many of the above elements – his liner notes also nod to the influence of such disparate forces as the rapper Kool Keith, the minimalism of Steve Reich and Beethoven’s string quartets – and is perhaps the fullest picture yet of his very singular strand of “polyphony, dissonance and unison”.

Not all of the tracks work: sometimes there is simply too much going on, too many shifts of scene and gear within a 10-strong all-star ensemble. Yet when the air clears and the music coalesces; when one of Smith’s building blocks – drums, vibes, bass, synthesisers, strings, horns and spoken word – smartly reasserts itself; when there is a striking solo from such of-the-moment players as the tenor saxophonist James Brandon Lewis and the trumpeter Nate Wooley, then Laugh Ash is gloriously unpredictable and thrillingly original, an album that plays by its own extravagantly individual set of rules.