Eight players, eight tracks, one session. 8 gathers Jakob Bro with Brian Blade, Craig Taborn, Chris Cheek, Jesper Zeuthen, Anders Christensen, Larry Grenadier, and Marcus Gilmore for a programme of compositions by Paul Motian and Bro, cut in a single day at New York's Power Station with engineer James Farber, immediately following a week-long residency at the Village Vanguard.

The instrumentation tells you most of what you need to know about the intent: two bassists and two drummers, with Bro's guitar, Taborn's piano, and the two horns of Cheek and Zeuthen moving across the top. Bro's own records tend toward reflection and quiet, and the octet takes that material and pulls it apart, opening the ambient-leaning writing to a density and a friction it doesn't usually carry. Reviewing the Vanguard run, Jazztrail described a poised sound world discomposed and distended by the group, with the size of the band creating constant openings for spontaneous invention.

The Motian material is not an outside choice. Bro spent years in Motian's Electric Bebop Band, and the writing - open, melodically plain, rhythmically unfixed - has been in his playing ever since. Here it is handled by a band that includes two drummers who each carry their own relationship to that lineage, which gives pieces like It Should've Happened A Long Time Ago and the two versions of Drum Music a weight that a smaller group could not produce.

Issued by Loveland on LP, CD, and digital.