Whit Dickey, Rob Brown and Joe Morris have been playing together for years, yet very little of the trio's music is available commercially. Morris' Riti label has remedied that with the release of Prophet Moon, taken from a live performance early last year. The members of the trio, all card-carrying members of New York's present underground jazz syndicate, are well attuned to each other at this point in their evolution. Again Brown and Morris align with one another as a deeply capable front line, exercising free speech, chasing stray impulses, and spinning high-speed lines that seldom come off disproportionately. In Dickey's kit, the trio achieves a true bottom with the kick drum emulating an ostinato bass line, as on "The Word on the Street." The drummer's diversity is further represented during the opening of "Trial By Fire," where he uses mallets in a cross-armed system of spherical handiwork, enabling sax and guitar to seamlessly enter the game, producing a rich, uncluttered spectrum of sound. Morris' playing is characteristically symptomatic of a musician with an eternal vocabulary on his instrument, but employing the right gestures so as to not alienate the listener. His extensive riffing on the long title track consciously meanders in and out of the fore, at once taking charge of the tune's evolution while affording an abundance of space for his pals to supplement the music's development.

While only a small measure of each musician's versatility is accounted for, Prophet Moon is alluring in its understatement. If comparisons must be dropped, Brown's tone could easily be deemed inimitable, were it not for his horn's fleeting tendency to sound like Ornette Coleman's, as happens in the concluding "Telling Moment." But using that brand of flavor, subconsciously or not, is rarely a bad thing. At any rate, the trio sustains a completely unique sound here, never falling victim to repetition. The appeal is in the details andthe disc maintains a striking balance from beginning to end.