It could simply have been a one-time encounter, but the November 2015 concert, in a small Brussels club – where these three great improvisers of different ages, origins and cultures "took their marks" together for the first time – was so exhilarating that they decided by mutual agreement to continue the adventure. Seven years later (the age of reason?), this funambulistic trio now appears as one of the most exciting small experimental groups in contemporary jazz. Bringing together the lyrical and vehement style of Tony Malaby's tenor saxophone, the Dadaist sounds of Jozef Dumoulin's keyboards and the as mathematical as sensual drumming of the young Samuel Ber, this unlikely association creates a music mixing flows of textures and polymetric speeds – both puzzling and irresistibly energetic.

This new project is an exploration of music and words. Richard Bonnet and François Raulin have penned original compositions inspired by Japanese haiku, short poems that speak of an event or feeling in a few words. Mike Ladd, a powerful and sensitive poet/rapper, improvises his texts and his flow live onstage. Finally, Bruno Chevillon and Tom Rainey's powerful rhythm section lays the foundations for this imagined building. The result is an ode to the ephemeral: a celebration of beauty and the evanescence of things.

This set was written, rehearsed and played almost from within. It came at a time when the health crisis was keeping us apart from one another, preventing us from communicating. As we listen to this music, we come into contact with a fluid yet cheerfully sinuous universe, which is part of the history of jazz, and what it says about the present without ever trying to re-tell the past. It all started with long improvisations from which the main motifs were extracted like so many pretexts, so many beacons and so many landmarks in the haunting ambient fog. As if to better reach the shores that we longed for in such uncertain times.

The contrapuntal writing for viola and tenor underlines the connivance of the protagonists and beyond that, it embodies the supreme interplay between the five members of this peaceful quintet that was a fixture on the Berlin scene for many years.