Jim Hart’s Cloudmakers are a trio with one of the quietest instruments in jazz – the vibraphone – at their centre, but they never sound underpowered. Hart, bassist Michael Janisch and drummer Dave Smith tour their intricate, challenging but uncannily inviting second album in the UK this month. Hart wrote all the tracks – typical exercises in mathematically hip rhythm patterns carrying absorbing themes, with Janisch’s muscular basslines and Smith’s firm, exclamatory drumming making melody and rhythm indivisible. The snappy Snaggletooth opens over a prodding groove, but embraces abstract improv for the bass and accelerating drums over languidly swimming chords. Angular Momentum is a minimalist motif-repeat, switching unison-playing and stop-start jabs, and Post Stone is a gathering flurry of free improv. But the gently spinning Early Hours – its graceful melodic dance jointly unveiled by Hart and Janisch – shows how lyrical this band can be, and Conversation Killer launches Hart into a solo of fluid suppleness that reveals a composer’s and an improviser’s instincts in balance. Cloudmakers continue to advance their collective aptitude for making a threesome of rhythm-section instruments sound forceful and ethereal by turns.