Like so many of the best adventures, the transatlantic trio of Irish drummer Stephen Davis and American trumpeter and pianist Ralph Alessi and Kris Davis grew organically out of a series of happy accidents... Steve Davis explains: "The group started with me writing some music originally for trumpet and piano. I had written other stuff for my London based group Human, which had a similar vibe but this music was more introvert, had lots of little hidden things within it. I won an Arts Council grant which enabled me to work on my writing and travel a bit, so I headed for New York. "I met Kris through saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock: after some initial conversation over email we decided to do some playing together when I was in New York which turned into a recording. As I had this music already composed for piano and trumpet I suggested we got a trumpet player to join us and Kris mentioned a few she liked to work with. Once she said Ralph I jumped at it!We contacted him and he said 'yes' so the trio was born. The recording was done in around five hours in a studio on Brooklyn. It was just so easy.The three of us just connected and I loved it.The music is part composed,part improvised.I really did not tell them much, I just chatted about certain feelings within the compositions or different approaches to phrasing. Other than that we just played and listened to each other. I had no aims other than to get the music into a place of freedom." Sugar Blade is the result of those five hours of freedom in a Brooklyn studio - a crucible of invention where three disparate voices combine in the moment to create cohesive musical statements. Listen to how the opening track, 'Let's Go Knitting,' combines Kris Davis's fidgety, nervous piano with Alessi's aloof trumpet commentary, riding an information-rich undertow of dense snare work, with Stephen Davis throwing out swift blurs and trills and punctuating rim-shots