Star rating: ****

"In-between numbers we practise our Swedish," quipped double bassist Anders Jormin as he, pianist Bobo Stenson and drummer Jon Falt consulted on spontaneous programme changes. And in-between practising their Swedish, the trio communicate with gracefulness and a mischievousness that might involve Falt swishing a brush under a microphone, rooting around in the selection of toys at his feet or just clearing his throat in imitation of a drum break.

Stenson is nominally the leader and there's enough in this Scandinavian jazz veteran's elegant ruminations on simple ideas and his ability to develop a theme into a cliffhanger to justify calling this a piano trio. Yet he's also the facilitator, encouraging Jormin to contribute the quietly speculative opener, Seli, and the initially enigmatic but increasingly momentous M, and genially indulging Falt, knowing that his capers always have entirely musical intentions.

As with their record company ECM, there's an attention to sound in their endeavours.

Jormin, for example, plays with a touch that appears to let notes escape rather than having to press strings on to fingerboard. There's meat, too, though, in a group that turns the climbing baroque of Henry Purcell's Music for a While into an improvisation that really sings, and makes A Fixed Goal by Ornette Coleman - as idiosyncratic and American as jazz composers come - sound like a very Scandinavian strain of bebop.

What perhaps summed them up best, however, was all three picking up on a cuckoo-like phrase, passing it from one to another and working it up into a rocking, swinging celebration that combined serious creativity with uninhibited fun and above all, heart.