Guitarist Miles Okazaki opened a new avenue of expression with 2017’s Trickster and the follow-up recordings The Sky Below and Trickster’s Dream. On Thisness, the fourth outing to feature the guitarist’s rhythmically mesmerising Trickster quartet, the blend of acoustic piano (Matt Mitchell) and electric bass (Anthony Tidd) still holds sway over the hard-edged, asymmetric funk language laid down by drummer Sean Rickman. Mitchell brings Rhodes and Prophet-6 keyboards into the sonic space while Okazaki weaves a web of acoustic and electric guitar (grabbing attention with the unexpected nylon-string opening of “In Some Far Off Place”). The writing is rigorous, with difficult unisons for guitar and piano, and yet there’s an elasticized, open-ended quality to the programme of just four pieces, each with a title drawn from the poetry of the late Sun Ra.